Roberto Lewis-Fernandez, MD, is Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia College of Physicians & Surgeons; Immediate Past President, Society for the Study of Psychiatry and Culture (2015-18); President, World Association of Cultural Psychiatry (2018-21); and past President, American Society of Hispanic Psychiatry (2013-14). At Columbia University since 2002, he has been Director, Hispanic Treatment Program, New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), and since 2007, he has been Director, New York State Center of Excellence for Cultural Competence, NYSPI, one of only two centers in New York State. He has chaired both the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, Cultural Psychiatry Committee since 2005, and the APA/SAMHSA Minority Fellowship Selection Committee of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) since 2015. From 2008 to 2013, he was a member of the DSM-5 Study Group on Gender and Culture, APA, and from 2010 to 2013 he was Chair, Cross-Cultural Issues Subgroup of the DSM-5 Study Group on Gender and Cross-Cultural Issues. He has 142 peer-reviewed publications; for 81, he was either first or senior author. He has 50 book chapters; for 30, he was either first or senior author. He was the first editor of one book: Lewis-Fernández R, Aggarwal NK, Hinton L, Hinton DE, Kirmayer LK (eds.): The DSM-5 Handbook on the Cultural Formulation Interview. Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Publishing, 2016. He was awarded the 2014 APA Simón Bolívar Award which “honors a prominent advocate for Hispanics and is designed to sensitize APA members to the mental health problems and goals of Hispanics.”

H. Steven Moffic, MD, for his monotheistic trilogy Islamophobia and Psychiatry, Anti-Semitism and Psychiatry, and Christianity and Psychiatry.

Dr. Moffic, known for his long focus on cultural psychiatry education as well as antiracism activism, was asked by an editor of Springer International in 2017 to edit a book on Islamophobia and Psychiatry: Recognition, Prevention, and Treatment. Moffic, a Jewish psychiatrist, recruited a team of co-editors, including Muslim psychiatrists Dr. Ahmed Hankir and Dr. Rania Awaad, and a Christian colleague, Dr. John Peteet. As the process of putting the book together went well and seemed like a monotheistic interfaith model of cooperation and knowledge, Dr. Moffic decided to pursue a major monotheistic trilogy, to follow this book with similar ones on Anti-Semitism and Christianity. Islamophobia and Psychiatry was published in late 2018, with sales and reviews being positive. For Anti-Semitism and Psychiatry: Recognition, Prevention, and Interventions, Dr. Moffic collaborated with Jewish psychiatrist Dr. Mary Seeman and a multi-faith group of chapter writers, including Hindu psychiatrists, as well as agnostics. The volume was published in February of 2020 and was also very well received. The last volume of the monotheistic trilogy, on Christianity and Psychiatry, is nearing submission to the publisher. Dr. Peteet is lead editor, and Dr. Harold Koenig is a co-editor.

Bonnie Kaiser, PhD, MPH, is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and the Global Health Program at UC San Diego. She became active in SSPC after receiving the Charles Hughes Fellowship in 2012. She began on the Program Committee in 2014, Chairing the committee since 2016. The quality of the Annual Meetings has improved dramatically under her leadership. Her contributions to SSPC also include serving as a Board Member since 2016 and serving as Secretary since 2017. Following Liz Kramer’s retirement as SSPC Executive Director, Bonnie revamped the Secretary position to include many of the tasks that previously fell under the Executive Director role. Her contributions have been critical to SSPC’s successful leadership transition, and she also led the organization in transitioning to virtual meetings for the past two years. Bonnie has provided SSPC dedicated and distinguished service.

Alec Terrana for Foundations of Somali resiliency: Insights from a non-Western perspective

I am a second year medical student intending on pursuing combined family medicine-psychiatry training with a focus in community and cultural psychiatry. My background includes working with refugee communities from East Africa and the Middle East, providing both acute care in a camp and long-term care in a social work setting. I have maintained this commitment to meeting patients on their own terms through my work at UC San Diego’s Free Clinic as a manager of both the Psychiatry and Integrative Specialty Clinics. These roles have allowed me to learn from members of the local Hispanic community about how they overcome suffering in their own lives. I have also been able to probe these questions within the local Somali community by facilitating focus groups in which we discussed how their culture and Muslim faith bolsters them against adversity.
My training as a massage therapist and yoga instructor also informs my approach to mental health through the added lens of somatic therapies and mindfulness exercises. Although I have maintained a long-standing interest in how these approaches may augment traditional therapies in a clinical setting, I have recently stepped into the Mindful Leadership space to advocate for the potential of mindfulness tools to be used in the service of racial justice. This has culminated in the development and delivery of curricular content on the inner work of racial justice, the role of mindfulness in advancing health equity, and mindful communication about race and racism in collaboration with local leaders in this space.