Francis G. Lu, MD
A professor of Clinical Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), Francis G. Lu, MD, is also the director of the Cultural Competence and Diversity Program, Department of Psychiatry, at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH), where he has worked for over 29 years. He is the founder of the Asian Focus Psychiatric Inpatient Program, which served as a model for five other focus programs serving black, Latino, women, gay/lesbian and HIV patients. In 1987, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) awarded these programs a Certificate of Significant Achievement.
In 1991, UCSF awarded Dr. Lu, along with two other SFGH Department of Psychiatry faculty, the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Award for “extraordinary leadership and inspiration in furthering the goal of achieving ethnic diversity within the UCSF community” for the development of these programs.
In 1999, the American College of Psychiatrists awarded the Creativity in Psychiatric Education Award to these programs. From 2004 to 2006, Dr. Lu chaired the Equal Opportunity Committee of the UCSF Academic Senate, and was the UCSF representative to the system wide Academic Senate UCAAD. He has also served for four years on the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Diversity, and chaired the Faculty Subcommittee for two years.
As a Distinguished Fellow of the APA, Dr. Lu has contributed to the areas of cultural psychiatry, psychiatric education, film and the transpersonal, and the interface of psychiatry and religion/spirituality through his presentations. He has participated on expert panels and advisory committees on diversity, cultural competence, and mental health disparities sponsored by the APA, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Office of Minority Health, HRSA, SAMHSA Center for Mental Health Services, the California Endowment, the Templeton Foundation, the California State Department of Mental Health and UCSF. He has been published in more than 70 publications.
The APA awarded him the 2001 Kun-Po Soo Award for his work in integrating Asian issues into psychiatry. Dr. Lu received a Special APA Presidential Commendation for his work in cross-cultural psychiatry in 2002 and, since 2003, Dr. Lu has chaired the APA Council on Minority Mental Health and Health Disparities. The National Alliance for the Mentally Ill awarded him an Exemplary Psychiatrist Award for exceptional cultural awareness and sensitivity in 2002. The Association of Gay and Lesbian Psychiatrists awarded him its Distinguished Service Award in 2003. He is a fellow of the Pacific Rim College of Psychiatrists, as well as a member of the American College of Psychiatrists and the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Cultural Psychiatry Committee.
From 1994 to 2000, Dr. Lu served as chairperson of the Media Subcommittee of the Scientific Program Committee of the APA. He served as Executive Scientific Advisor for a 58-minute training videotape/DVD, “The Culture of Emotions,” about the DSM-IV Outline for Cultural Formulation. Since 1987, he has co-led 19 five-day film seminars at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, CA, exploring film and the transpersonal; 14 were co-led with a Benedictine monk, Brother David Steindl-Rast. Dr. Lu received his BA from Columbia University, and an MD from Dartmouth Medical School and completed psychiatry residency training at Mount Sinai Medical Center, New York.
John J. Norcini, PhD
John J. Norcini, PhD became the first President and Chief Executive Officer of the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research (FAIMER) in May 2002. Prior to his position at FAIMER, Dr. Norcini worked at the American Board of Internal Medicine (ABIM) for 25 years, working his way up from data analyst and associate in psychometrics to Director of Psychometrics. He held two senior positions at ABIM, from 1988 to 1997, and from 1997 until 2002.
Dr. Norcini’s principal academic interest is in the area of the assessment of physician performance. He is on the editorial boards of five peer-reviewed journals in measurement and medical education, and has published extensively. Current major research interests include methods for setting standards, assessing practice performance, and testing professional competence.
Since joining FAIMER, Dr. Norcini has been instrumental in identifying the Foundation’s areas of thematic focus. He was also instrumental in the board’s adoption of a strategic plan and selection of regional emphases. Dr. Norcini is also credited with reorganizing FAIMER, and making a number of key staff appointments to ensure academic and educational support as its activities continue to develop.
Under Dr. Norcini’s leadership, FAIMER has created a niche, and established credibility of its own. Dr. Norcini continued to conduct critical work in the areas of research, data resources, and education. Although it is still linked to ECFMG, FAIMER has emerged as a significant entity in international health professions’ education. The areas that produce the greatest interest internationally are the International Medical Education Directory (IMED), and the fellowship programs; FAIMER’s research agenda is recognized nationally.
Nyapati R. Rao, MD, MS
Nyapati R. Rao, known to his friends as Raghu Rao, completed his undergraduate medical education in India, and migrated to the United States for postgraduate training in Psychiatry. He completed his residency at Brookdale Hospital Medical Center in Brooklyn, where he was later appointed the director of residency training in psychiatry. Subsequently, he directed the psychiatry training program at SUNY-Downstate Medical Center, and is now the Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at NUMC, and the Chief Academic Officer at NuHealth.
A professor of clinical psychiatry, Dr. Rao has written and conducted numerous presentations on various aspects of the International Medical Graduates (IMG) experience. He is the founding Chair of the Committee on IMGs at the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP), as well as a member of the board of directors of GAP, a prestigious national organization dedicated to creating greater public awareness of the need for new programs in mental health for the people in the United States.
A member of the American College of Psychiatry, as well as a member of the IMG Governing Council of the American Medical Association, Dr. Rao is a distinguished Fellow of the APA. He was recently honored as the Educator of the Year by the Association of Academic Psychiatry. In addition, Dr. Rao received the prestigious 2009 George Tarjan Award, from the American Psychiatric Association, in recognition of his significant contributions to advocacy of international medical graduates.
He lives with his wife Meera, and two children, Uttam and Meghana, in Nassau County.
Laura Roberts, MD
Laura Roberts, MD, is the Charles E. Kubly Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. She founded and serves as Director of the Empirical Ethics Group, a multi-site, multidisciplinary research team devoted to exploring clinical ethical issues in medicine.
Dr. Roberts received fellowship training and served as the Director of Programs at the Center for Clinical Medical Ethics at the University of Chicago, prior to her tenure in New Mexico. She has written extensively on innovations in medical-ethics education, and she has guest-edited special issues on the topic for Academic Medicine in 1989, and Academic Psychiatry in 1996. Dr. Roberts is the recipient of two NARSAD Young Investigator Awards, and has received several NIH-funded research grants, including a Career Scientist Award from the NIMH.
Through multiple avenues on local, regional and national levels, Dr. Roberts focuses on improving the care of people with serious illnesses. A valued teacher, she has received many honors and awards from medical students, residents and faculty colleagues. In her role as Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin, she continues to teach, present and publish on topics related to ethics in physical and mental health care, research ethics, rural ethics, and medical education.
Her scholarly work has focused on six lines of conceptual and empirical study, all related to ethical issues in clinical care, research and education involving special populations. She has pursued a systematic, sequential elaboration of two themes: clarifying the nature, determinants, predisposing features and ramifications of human vulnerability and strength; and seeking to understand the relationship between experience, education and moral development. Dr. Roberts envisions that her scholarly life will continue to be dedicated to these related conceptual areas, and to discovering ways to apply what she has learned in a sound manner within the profession of medicine.
Dr. Robert’s work focuses on the translation of concepts and observations (i.e., theory and data) into concrete, constructive interventions to enhance the experience of others. She contends that valuing and finding ethical meaning in the perspective of the individual, and then discovering the patterns present in groups of individuals, are special gifts that the field of psychiatry can bring to clinical ethics.
Joel Yager, MD
Joel Yager, MD, is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Colorado, and a Professor Emeritus at both UCLA and the University of New Mexico. His research has focused on eating disorders, primary-care psychiatry, medical professional development and education, practice guidelines, and mental-health-services research.
Dr. Yager currently chairs the American Psychiatric Association’s Steering Committee on Practice Guidelines, and serves on the Oversight Work Group and Scientific Review Committee for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM5). He has previously served in many other capacities for the American Psychiatric Association, and on Committees of the Institute of Medicine and NIMH. He has also served as president, and chaired major committees in several professional organizations, and been appointed to editorial boards of the American Journal of Psychiatry, Archives of General Psychiatry and Academic Psychiatry. He currently serves an associate editor of Journal Watch for Psychiatry, and on the editorial boards of seven other psychiatric journals. He has published more than 250 articles and chapters, and eight edited books.
Throughout his career, Dr. Yager has received honors and awards from the American Medical Association, American Psychiatric Association, National Institute of Mental Health, Association for Academic Psychiatry, the Academy for Eating Disorders, and the National Eating Disorders Association.
Jacob Sperber, MD
Jacob Sperber, MD, has been a psychiatry residency training director for eleven years, and is currently the Vice Chair for Education & Training, and the Residency Training Director in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at Nassau University Medical Center (NUMC), East Meadow, New York. In addition to overseeing the psychiatry residency, two psychiatry fellowships, and medical-student rotations from three medical schools, he heads the curricula for interviewing and for psychotherapies training, and lectures on the neurobiology of addiction. Under his leadership in 2007 and in 2013 the NUMC residency program twice received the maximum ACGME accreditation of five years, with commendation. He has also chaired or co-chaired many institutional committees, including the hospital’s Competencies and Curricula Committee, the APA’s IMG Institute, and the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry’s Global Psychiatry Committee. His is the founding Associate Director of the Von Tauber Institute for Global Psychiatry, www.vtigp.org.
Licensed to practice in New York and California, he graduated from the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1975, and has his BA from the University of California, Berkeley, 1968. He is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, where he received the Residency Teaching Award in 2005. He is Co-Chair of the Global Psychiatry Committee of the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry.
