On January 3, APA President Maria A. Oquendo, M.D., Ph.D., assumed a new role as professor and chair of psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
In her new position, Oquendo will lead a department of 130 full-time faculty members who practice and conduct research in psychiatry and behavioral health, including depression, schizophrenia, eating disorders, and substance use disorders. Oquendo was previously a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center.
“I am excited to join the psychiatry faculty at the University of Pennsylvania and lead this accomplished team,” Oquendo said in a press release. “Together we can discover new ways to treat mental illness and offer the highest quality care to our patients.”
Internationally known for neurobiological studies of suicidal behavior, Oquendo has used positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to map brain abnormalities in mood disorders and suicidal behavior. In 2003, when issues regarding antidepressants’ potential risk for inducing suicidal behavior first arose, she was one of several researchers commissioned by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop a classification system to examine suicide-related events in the data. This system is endorsed by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now used worldwide.
Oquendo first proposed suicidal behavior should be its own diagnostic category in 2008, arguing it would facilitate tracking of high-risk patients in medical records. She succeeded in adding it to the DSM-5 chapter on conditions for further study. This conceptualization addresses the fact that suicidal behavior occurs in conditions from schizophrenia to autism, not only as a depressive symptom. Her research to support its validity and reliability as a diagnostic entity is ongoing. She has written or cowritten over 350 peer-reviewed articles.
In addition to serving as the president of APA, Oquendo is the president of the International Academy of Suicide Research and vice president of the board of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. She is past president of the American Society of Hispanic Psychiatry and serves on the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology’s Council and the National Institute of Mental Health’s National Advisory Mental Health Council.
Oquendo received her M.D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1984. She completed her residency training at the Payne Whitney Clinic of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell. She received her Ph.D. in psychiatry from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2010. ■
