Members Choose Ruiz as APA's Next President-Elect

Pedro Ruiz, M.D., won the race for president-elect in APA's 2005 election, with 73.5 percent of voters selecting him for the post. Ruiz, who is concluding a two-year term as vice president, outpolled Area 4 Trustee Sidney Weissman, M.D., of Chicago.

Ruiz is a professor and vice chair of the psychiatry department at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and a past president of the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology. Weissman is director of psychiatry residency training at Northwestern University, where he is also a professor of psychiatry. He is a past president of the American Association for Adolescent Psychiatry and the Illinois Psychiatry Society.

Ruiz told Psychiatric News that during his president-elect year, which begins at the close of the APA annual meeting in May, he plans to work very hard to assist incoming president Steven Sharfstein, M.D., achieve his goals for patients and the profession.

When his term as president begins in May 2006, Ruiz said that“ universal access, comprehensive parity, and humane care” will be among the goals for which he will work. He added that he intends to reach out to patient-oriented organizations such as the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill and the National Mental Health Association “to address the needs of the mentally ill in this country and abroad, especially for the disadvantaged and disenfranchised patient population, such as patients who are chronically mentally ill or homeless.”

In the contest to succeed Ruiz as vice president, Nada Stotland, M.D., currently APA secretary, captured 61.7 percent of the vote against Patricia Recupero, M.D., J.D. Recupero, of Providence, R.I., represents the Rhode Island Psychiatric Society in the APA Assembly. Stotland is a professor of psychiatry at Rush Medical College in Chicago.

David Fassler, M.D., of Burlington, Vt., won a second term as an APA trustee-at-large. He defeated Charles Bensonhaver, M.D., of Johns Island, S.C., garnering 61.6 percent of the vote.

The Area 2 and Area 5 trustee positions were also up for election this year. In Area 2, incumbent Ann Marie Sullivan, M.D., won 60.1 percent of the vote, while Jack Drescher, M.D., gained 39.9 percent. Both live in New York City.

In Area 5, where there was no incumbent in the race, Mary Helen Davis, M.D., of Louisville, Ky., won over Dudley Stewart Jr., M.D., of New Orleans. Davis won 52.9 percent of the vote.

APA's members-in-training voted to make Lysiane Ribeiro, M.D., M.P.H., the next member-in-training trustee-elect. This was a three-way race against opponents Robert Kelly, M.D., a resident at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York, and Chanley Martin, M.D., J.D., a resident at the University of Louisville. Ribeiro is a resident at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

In races with more than two candidates, APA uses a “preferential voting system” in which voters are asked to rank the candidates in the order in which they would like to see them win. If no candidate garners a majority on the first round of counting, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is eliminated, and the second-choice votes on the ballots cast for him or her are distributed to the remaining candidates. In the member-in-training trustee-elect race, Ribeiro won in the second round of counting, with 55.5 percent of the vote.

All new officers and trustees will take office at the conclusion of APA's 2005 annual meeting in May. At that time, Carolyn Robinowitz, M.D., who is currently treasurer, will become secretary-treasurer, a change enacted by a vote of the membership on the 2003 ballot to downsize the Board of Trustees by combining the secretary and treasurer positions and eliminating one of the two vice-president positions. Also, Daniel Mamah, M.D., currently member-in-training trustee-elect, will become member-in-training trustee.

There were 30,546 eligible voters in this year's election, and 34.1 percent of them, or 10,424, voted, the highest total in four years.

Online voting experienced a huge surge this year, with 23.6 percent of the members who voted doing so online, nearly triple the 8.7 percent who voted online last year. The Tellers Committee was scheduled to present these results to the Board of Trustees on March 6.

A chart showing detailed results of the 2005 APA election will appear in the next issue. ▪