Melissa Arbuckle, MD, PhD

Vice Chair for Education and Director of Resident Education in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia and the New York State Psychiatric Institute
Associate Professor of Clinical Psychiatry
Co‐chair of the National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative (NNCI)

Melissa Arbuckle, MD, PhD is Vice Chair for Education and Director of Resident Education in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Arbuckle’s interests focus on the role of medical education in advancing the translation of research into the practice of psychiatry.

Dr. Arbuckle is a principal investigator on Columbia’s NIH funded R25 Research Track (along with Drs. David Leonardo and Harold Pincus). This program, “Priming the Pump: Training Physician‐ Scientists in Translational Neuroscience,” aims to support the development of physician‐scientists who are dedicated to translational research in psychiatry. As part of her effort to expand the translation of basic neuroscience to clinical practice, Dr. Arbuckle is also co‐chair of the National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative (NNCI), an NIH funded collaboration to create, pilot, and disseminate a comprehensive set of shared resources to help train psychiatrists to integrate a modern neuroscience perspective into their clinical work.

In bridging patient‐oriented and population‐based research, Dr. Arbuckle has been extensively involved in developing quality improvement (QI) training programs for residents in psychiatry. Her training program in QI has been recognized as a “model curriculum” by the Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training. Dr. Arbuckle is also a principal investigator (along with Dr. Milton Wainberg) for Columbia’s NIH funded T32 Research Fellowship in Global Mental Health, which is focused on training fellows in implementation and dissemination research in order to identify and develop models for effective mental health care delivery in low- and middle-income countries.