An engineer's path to the brain.
I am a psychiatrist and a biomedical engineer. I spent a decade building instruments that made tissue measurable before I ever wrote a prescription, and that order of operations — measure first, then act, then check whether you were right — is still how I practise.
How I got here.
I did not start in psychiatry. I started in engineering, building imaging instruments, and what held my attention there was not the biology in the abstract. It was that a carefully built instrument could make visible something that had previously only been argued about.
[An earlier draft of this paragraph described undergraduate work at UCLA on selective plane illumination microscopy. That project is not in the material I was working from, so I have removed it rather than publish a biographical claim I cannot source. If it is on your CV, send the project, the laboratory and supervising investigator, and the years, and it goes back into the paragraph above — an early imaging project is precisely the detail that makes the engineer-to-psychiatrist arc land. If it is not, the paragraph reads correctly as it stands and this note simply comes out.]
That became the next decade of work. In the UCLA–Caltech Medical Scientist Training Program I earned an MD and a PhD in bioengineering, developing Dynamic Optical Contrast Imaging — a label-free, fluorescence-lifetime method for telling one tissue from another in real time during head and neck cancer surgery, where a surgeon otherwise has to judge by eye and by feel where a tumour ends and where the parathyroid glands begin. The programme was funded by an NIH–NCI R01, produced two patents, and was translated into the operating room at UCLA; my 2020 dissertation was about that translation. Across my career to date I have published more than twenty peer-reviewed papers and proceedings, together with three book chapters. Along the way I co-founded Sling Health LA, a student-run medical device incubator.
Residency brought me to psychiatry at UCSF, on the research track, and the instinct I had carried out of engineering found its proper home there. Psychiatry asks clinicians to make consequential decisions with fewer objective measurements than almost any other specialty, and that gap is not a reason to be less rigorous — it is a reason to be more explicit about what you know and how you know it. I graduated with distinction in neuropsychiatry and interventional psychiatry, supervised junior residents at the UCSF Bipolar Clinic and on the inpatient services, and gained my practical interventional experience through UCSF and Acacia Clinics.
My research now is an attempt to narrow that same gap. I am a sub-investigator on a trial of low-intensity focused ultrasound for treatment-resistant depression at UCSF, sponsored by Attune Neuroscience; I work on fMRI connectivity-guided TMS for chronic tinnitus at Stanford alongside colleagues in neurology, radiology and head and neck surgery; and I am a sub-investigator on an NIMH-funded study of kilohertz transcranial magnetic perturbation for the anhedonic dimension of depression. All three are research. They run under protocol, with consent, eligibility criteria and independent oversight, and they are described on the research page rather than offered here as treatment.
What all of this means for the person sitting across from me is fairly ordinary. It means I am slow to be certain, and I say so out loud. It means I would rather read the prior records, order the test and name the differential than settle a question by intuition. It means that when a treatment does not do what we hoped, I read that as information about the problem rather than as a failure of yours. Building instruments teaches you that the answer is never the interesting part. Knowing how far to trust it is.
How I practise
Three things patients most often want to know before they call.
What a first visit actually involves
An initial evaluation is a long conversation, not a form. I want the whole arc: when the symptoms began and what was happening in your life at the time; what has already been tried, at what dose, for how long, and what each attempt actually felt like from the inside; sleep, alcohol and substance use, medical history and medications; what runs in your family; and what other clinicians have already found. Where it matters I will ask to review the prior records, laboratory results and imaging directly rather than work from a summary at second hand.
Most of that first appointment is spent listening. The formulation and the plan come at the end of it, and I will tell you plainly which parts I am confident about, which parts are a working hypothesis, and what would change my mind. If I think the right clinician for you is someone else, I will say that too.
[Describe the actual shape of your intake — how long the first visit runs and whether it is one long appointment or two shorter ones, whether it is in person, by telehealth, or either, and what you want the patient to send beforehand (records release, current medication list, recent labs). People decide whether to call based on knowing what they are committing to. This has to match your real scheduling template and the session length quoted in your Good Faith Estimate, since the federal No Surprises Act requires that estimate to be accurate for self-pay patients.]
How I think about medication
A medication is a tool with a specific job. It is not a verdict about you, and starting one is not an admission of anything. My bias is to change one variable at a time, at a dose that can actually be interpreted, so that when something shifts we can say why. Stacking three changes in a fortnight usually buys a faster answer to a question nobody can now answer.
Before we start something I will tell you what it is meant to do, roughly how long it should take to do it, which side effects are common and which are the ones that mean you should call me, and what the plan is if it does not work. I will also tell you when the evidence is thin. Reviewing what you are already taking is part of the same job: a medication that is no longer doing anything is not neutral, and stopping carefully is as much a clinical decision as starting.
When I recommend something other than medication
Not every problem is a medication problem. Sometimes the correct answer is psychotherapy of a particular kind rather than therapy in general; sometimes it is treating sleep, or an untreated medical condition, or a pattern of substance use that is doing more work than anyone had credited. Sometimes it is a neuromodulation approach. When that is the case I will say so directly, and where the treatment is not something this practice provides, I will make a proper referral rather than approximate it here.
[State plainly, in your own words, which treatments this practice provides in the office, which you refer out for, and which of the modalities discussed on the research page — TMS, low-intensity focused ultrasound, kTMP — are available only to eligible participants inside a research protocol and are not obtainable here as clinical care. This is the one paragraph on the site a reader is most likely to over-read in their own favour, and the research/clinical line is a consent and regulatory matter rather than a marketing one. If you do offer any of these clinically, say under what circumstances and where.]
Training and credentials
- Medical degree
- Doctor of Medicine, earned through the UCLA–Caltech Medical Scientist Training Program. [Name the degree-granting medical school exactly as it appears on your diploma and in your Medical Board of California profile. I have left it unnamed rather than infer it from the MSTP: this line is read by referring physicians and copied by credentialing and payer enrolment staff, all of whom verify it against the primary source, so it needs to match that source word for word.]
- Doctorate
- PhD in Bioengineering, University of California, Los Angeles. Dissertation, 2020: the clinical translation of Dynamic Optical Contrast Imaging for label-free tissue identification and surgical navigation in head and neck oncology.
- Residency
- Psychiatry, University of California, San Francisco — research track.
- Fellowship and distinction
- Graduated from UCSF with distinction in neuropsychiatry and interventional psychiatry. [If you completed a named, accredited fellowship — for example a clinical neuropsychiatry or interventional psychiatry fellowship — give its exact title, institution and years and it will be listed separately here. A distinction earned within residency and a completed fellowship are different credentials, and conflating them on a practice site is the sort of error a referring physician notices immediately.]
- Board status
- [Your board status, stated exactly as it stands today: "Board certified in psychiatry, American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology, certified [year]", or "Board eligible", or nothing at all. Do not leave this line approximate. "Board certified" is a term both the ABPN and the Medical Board of California treat as a representation of fact, and overstating it is among the most common origins of a complaint against a physician's website.]
- State licensure
- [Every state in which you hold an active, unrestricted medical licence, each with its licence number. Patients and referrers verify these against the Medical Board of California's public lookup, and telehealth eligibility depends entirely on which states appear here — so this list must be complete and must be updated the moment a licence is added or lapses.]
- National Provider Identifier
- [Your individual (Type 1) NPI, plus the group (Type 2) NPI if the practice bills under an entity. Out-of-network patients need it to submit their own claims, and it appears on every superbill you issue — publishing it here spares your front desk the same phone call every week.]
- Academic appointment
- [Your current academic title and department, written exactly as the university authorises it to appear on a private practice site (for example "Clinical Instructor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University"), or tell me to delete this row. Universities are specific about how affiliations may be used commercially, and an unapproved or outdated title is both a compliance problem and trivially checkable.]
- Professional memberships
- [Societies in which you currently hold active membership — for instance the American Psychiatric Association, the Clinical TMS Society, or a focused ultrasound society. List only current memberships with the year joined if you have it; lapsed ones are verifiable and read badly when found.]
Selected honors
Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans
NIH Medical Scientist Training Program Fellowship
Focused Ultrasound in Psychiatry Travel Award
John H. Bent Merit Scholarship
Department of Medicine Research Award, UCLA
Triological Society Travel Awards
Rivenburg Fellowship
Viola Hyde Excellence in Surgical Research Award
Most Outstanding Senior and Dean's Prize
Outside the office
[Two or three sentences here, written by you, in your own voice — what you do when you are not working, where you grew up, what you have been reading, the specific thing about you that is not a credential. Keep the register of the rest of the page: understated and concrete, not a list of hobbies arranged like a second CV. Patients cite this section more than any other as the reason they felt comfortable picking up the phone, because it is the only part of the site that tells them what it might be like to sit in a room with you. Write it yourself; a ghostwritten version of this paragraph is audible. If you would rather not have one at all, say so and the section comes out — a hollow gesture here is worse than its absence.]
If that sounds like the care you are looking for
Enquiries about new appointments, and questions about whether this practice is the right fit, are welcome. Please do not include confidential health information in a first message.
[Say here whether you are currently accepting new patients, and if there is a waiting list, say that plainly without attaching a timeframe to it. A stated wait becomes a promise the moment someone relies on it, and this line will need revisiting whenever your panel changes.]