Oquendo to Become APA’s Next President-Elect

APA’s voting members have selected Maria A. Oquendo, M.D., of New York City to become APA’s next president-elect. Oquendo outpolled Barton J. Blinder, M.D., Ph.D., of Newport Beach, Calif., and Charles F. Reynolds III, M.D., of Pittsburgh.

Oquendo is residency training director at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she started as a community psychiatrist. She is professor and vice chair for education at Columbia University, conducting research on mood disorders and suicide. As APA secretary, she chairs APA’s Conflict of Interest Committee. She formerly chaired APA’s SAMHSA Fellowship Selection Committee and has a small private practice. Blinder is a clinical professor and past director of Eating Disorder Research in the Department of Psychiatry, University of California, Irvine, and is in the private practice of adult and child psychiatry. Reynolds is the UPMC Endowed Professor in Geriatric Psychiatry and director of the Aging Institute of UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh.

“I am honored and grateful to have been elected to lead APA,” Oquendo told Psychiatric News. “This is an exciting time to practice psychiatry. Our knowledge base has grown exponentially in the last decades, and we still have the privilege of forming close therapeutic alliances with our patients and their families, offering relief for suffering. Yet, APA has much work to do.”

Commenting on her goals as president, Oquendo said they “include securing an appropriate role for psychiatrists as health care reform is implemented while ensuring that the most severely mentally ill people receive care. At the same time, it is essential to secure adequate federal funding for education and research through advocacy, ensure equitable reimbursement for psychiatric care, and enhance collaboration with psychiatric subspecialties and primary care. These aims will require that APA provide effective representation of psychiatry to the public and government.

“Importantly, I believe APA can continue to strive for diversity at all levels of the organization including representation from women, minority psychiatrists, international medical graduates, and LGBT members. I hope to harness my experience in teaching and mentoring to engage our trainee members and early career psychiatrists. They are our future.”

In the race for secretary, Altha J. Stewart, M.D., of Memphis emerged the winner over Rahn Kennedy Bailey, M.D., of Nashville.

For early career psychiatrist (ECP) trustee-at-large, Lama Bazzi, M.D., of Stony Brook, N.Y., outpolled Paul O’Leary, M.D., of Birmingham, Ala.

In the race for minority/underrepresented representative (M/UR) trustee, incumbent Gail Erlick Robinson, M.D., D.Psych., of Toronto won over Curley L. Bonds, M.D., of Los Angeles.

This year, three APA Areas elected trustees—Areas 1, 4, and 7. Retaining the position of Area 1 trustee is Jeffrey L. Geller, M.D., M.P.H., of Worcester, Mass. His opponent was Anthony J. Rothschild, M.D., also of Worcester, Mass. In Area 4, Ronald M. Burd, M.D., of Fargo, N.D., defeated Shastri “Swami” Swaminathan, M.D., of Chicago. In Area 7, incumbent Jeffrey Akaka, M.D., of Honolulu outpolled Stephen L. Brown, M.D., of Casper, Wyo., and Annette M. Matthews, M.D., of Portland, Ore.

Each year the Association’s resident members elect a resident-fellow member trustee-elect, who the following year rotates into the position of resident-fellow member trustee. Stella Cai, M.D., a resident at the University of California, Irvine, won this year’s race. Her opponents were Alicia A. Barnes, D.O., M.P.H., a resident at UMDMJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Camden, N.J., and Sarah Schmidhofer, M.D., a resident at Brown University.

Election results were approved by the Tellers Committee in February, but the results will not be official until after the Board of Trustees reviews them at its meeting this month. All of the winning candidates will assume their positions on the Board at the close of the annual meeting in May. ■

All results of the 2015 APA election can be accessed here.