Education & Training

As part of the Community Psychiatry Program at UC San Diego, CPRC’s work is naturally intertwined with behavioral health education, training, and workforce development. CPRC faculty and staff facilitate journal club discussions and didactic sessions, while also providing mentorship and experiential opportunities in community psychiatry research, for learners across UC San Diego’s diverse schools and programs.

CPP Journal Club

Journal Club is a thread in the weekly Community Psychiatry Program (CPP) didactics for general psychiatry residents, child and adolescent psychiatry fellows, and lifespan psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioners in community training tracks. The weekly Journal Club is designed to provide trainees with the necessary knowledge and skills to critically evaluate academic literature and integrate evidence-based practices into their work as community-based psychiatric providers. CPP trainees are required to lead one journal club per year on an empirical article of their choice.

CPP Resident & Fellow Scholarly Activity

Community-track psychiatry residents are required to complete an independent scholarly project (ISP) as part of their residency training program, and they may opt to complete their ISP in a community-engaged project with CPRC investigators.

Community-track psychiatry residents and child and adolescent psychiatry fellows can also participate in a longitudinal community psychiatry research elective. Trainees in the elective meet with CPRC investigators weekly to conceptualize and execute a project of their choosing, with the goal of developing a scholarly product of relevance to the field of community/public-sector psychiatry.

Trainee-Led Projects

Ongoing

Justine Ku, MD (Class of 2026)

Justine is collaborating with a colleague in emergency medicine, and leveraging UCSD Epic data, to examine patterns of behavioral PRN use across UCSD emergency departments. She is specifically interested in whether droperidol is associated with differences in the total amount of PRN medication received, or time to re-medication, among UCSD patients.

Jackie Vargas, MD (Class of 2026)

Jackie is leveraging publicly available HRS data to examine if blood-based biomarker patterns are predictive of transition to cognitive impairment among community-dwelling older adults. Jackie is also contributing to a corresponding manuscript which will be submitted for publication.

Mindy Kim, MD (Class of 2027)

Mindy is continuing to support CPRC’s AoCS project related to unmet social needs among individuals with psychosis at UCSD. She has taken over for Mikaela Miller and is working to support completion of data analyses, manuscript submission and revisions, and she will be presenting a poster at the 2026 APA annual meeting.

Matt Abrams, MD (Class of 2027)

Matt is leveraging publicly available Movement Advancement Project (MAP) and CDC Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) data to examine the relationship between state-level LGBTQIA+ laws and policies on perceived mental health among BRFSS respondents.

Natalie Lawrence, MD (Class of 2027)

Natalie is leveraging CDC Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS) to examine relationships among social media use, exposure to violence, and school absenteeism among diverse American youth using multivariate models.

Completed

Mikaela Miller, MD (Class of 2025)

Mikaela utilized the CDC Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) to examine postnatal well-baby visit adherence and its associations with perinatal maternal mental health. This project culminated in a manuscript that is now published in Archives of Women's Mental Health .