I graduated from the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, The Integrated Psychiatry Residency Training Program at the University of California, San Francisco and the adult psychoanalytic training program at The San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis.  I have been awarded the Keneth Appel, Sr. Prize in Psychiatry from the University of Pennsylvania and The Henry Laughlin Prize for outstanding clinical work in Psychoanalysis from the American College of Psychoanalysis.  I have published articles on clinical psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the leading journals.  

After becoming a psychiatrist, I completed a six-year intensive fellowship focusing on a range of modalities, including individual and couples psychotherapy, as well as intensive psychotherapies that address problems associated with long-term neglect, developmental trauma and aspects of personality that impede having deeply satisfying intimate relationships. 

Before attending medical school and completing my residence and postgraduate fellowship, I studied languages and comparative literature and worked as a translator and teacher.  This background has opened me up to the joy of discovery,  to what is unusual, new and beautiful as well as to what resists overly quick understanding.   

I continue to renew, revitalize and expand my knowledge and skill in multiple areas of my practice, including individual and couples psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, biological treatments, including the use of medications for anxiety and depression and the potential integrative functions of psychedelics.  Areas of both new and continued growth include helping people sleep better and feel more free in their sexual lives, and increasing my awareness and sensitivity to the richness of cultural and racial diversity in the Bay Area.

In addition to doing clinical work, I am a teacher and train developing and mid-career psychotherapists and psychiatrists and work as an ongoing consultant to my colleagues.   I also write and have published articles about doing psychotherapy and psychoanalysis.  I am a clinical professor at University of California, San Francisco and hold faculty positions at training institutes for mental health professionals in the Bay Area.

I follow research in the fields neuroscience and psychotherapy, and participate in academic research community.  Even so, I think the best treatment comes form clinicians who develop the majority of the time to caring for patients and to learning directly from experience of others.