2023 ACMT Symposium - On-Demand

Dr. Elizabeth Ballard is the Director of Psychology and Behavior Research and the Director of Predoctoral Training at the Experimental Therapeutics and Pathophysiology Branch in the National Institute of Mental Health.  She is trained as a clinical psychologist from the Catholic University of America and has extensive clinical experience working with suicidal patients.  She completed her predoctoral internship at the Department of Veterans Affairs Eastern Colorado Health Care System and a postdoctoral fellowship at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. As an associate scientist, she is the Lead Associate Investigator on the Neurobiology of Suicide Protocol in the Intramural Program of the NIMH.  She has published over 95 articles and her research interests include short term risk factors for suicide and rapid acting treatments for suicidal thoughts.

Dr. Campman is San Diego County’s Chief Medical Examiner.  He earned his B.S. in Biology from Loyola Marymount University in 1987; graduated from Creighton University School of Medicine in Omaha, in 1992, and then completed residency in Anatomic and Clinical Pathology at the University of California, Davis Medical Center, in 1997.  Following fellowship training in Forensic Pathology with the Northern California Forensic Pathology Group at the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office in 1998, he went to work for the US Air Force and was stationed at the Office of the Armed Forces Medical Examiner, the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, in Washington DC, as Associate, then Deputy and Chief Deputy Medical Examiner for Medicolegal Operations and Investigations, until he went to work for the County in 2001 (later continuing to serve in the Air Force Reserve as a Regional Medical Examiner until he retired).  He is Board Certified in Anatomical/Clinical, and Forensic Pathology, and leads the Medical Examiner’s Department while continuing to regularly perform autopsies, and testify in CA Superior Court.

Professor Carter is currently the Senior Staff Specialist and Acting Director of Dept. Consultation Liaison Psychiatry, Calvary Mater Newcastle Hospital, Waratah; and Conjoint Professor in Psychiatry in the College of Health, Medicine and Wellbeing, School of Medicine and Public Health, University of Newcastle. He is a Chief Investigator for the NHMRC Centre of Research Excellence in Suicide Prevention (CRESP 2.0). He is the Chair for the RANZCP for the Clinical Practice Guidelines for Deliberate Self-Harm, a member of the Presidents Suicide Advisory Committee and the RANZCP representative to the Prime Minister’s Suicide Advisory Group.

Current areas of clinical and research interest include; deliberate self-poisoning, suicide prevention, epidemiology of suicidal behaviours, delirium, screening for depression, somatisation, organ donation and psycho-oncology.

Andrew Dawson is an Australian Clinical Pharmacologist and Toxicologist whose major interest is in translational clinical toxicology research to produce changes in policy and clinical practice.

He established the Australian Hunter Area Toxicology Service in Newcastle in 1987, research included interventions for deliberate self-harm, relative toxicity of drugs in overdose and prediction of toxicity.

In 2004 he moved to Sri Lanka to establish the South Asian Clinical Toxicology Research Collaboration. This group built sustainable research capacity addressing deliberate self-harm with pesticides and improved clinical practice in resource poor settings. This research contributed to policy that reduced Sri Lankan national suicide deaths by 50%

In 2010 he returned to Australia and became the Director of Clinical Toxicology Royal Prince Alfred Hospital, and the Director of the New South Wales Poison Information Centre (to 2021) at the Childrens Hospital Westmead. He is Clinical Professor Medicine, University of Sydney and Adjunct Professor School of Medicine University of NSW. Current interests include management of institutional responses to patients with challenging self-harm behaviours, substance use disorder and self-harm, evaluating the effects of regulatory changes on incidence of deliberate self-harm.

My work’s major aim is to reduce deaths from pesticide and plant self-poisoning in rural Asia, a cause of over 200,000 premature deaths each year and a key global means of suicide. To do this, I perform clinical trials in South Asian district hospitals to better understand the pharmacology and effectiveness of antidotes and community-based controlled trials to identify effective public health interventions. This work is complemented by translational studies of antidotes in minipig models of poisoning in a large animal critical care laboratory that I established in Edinburgh, work with sociologists and anthropologists to better under-stand the meaning of self-harm, and work with the WHO and FAO to aid implementation. I work with pesticide regulators through the Centre for Pesticide Suicide Prevention. I also perform clinical and animal research in Edinburgh to improve treatment of other forms of poisoning (such as from cyanide, alcohol, and contrast media) by developing and/or testing novel antidotes.

Dr. Tharwat El Zahran is an Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine and the Medical director for the emergency department at the American University of Beirut Medical Center (AUBMC)

She completed a fellowship training in medical toxicology at Emory University and CDC, and currently co-directs the medical toxicology service at AUBMC.

Dr. Finkelstein is a Professor of Pediatrics, Pharmacology and Toxicology, University of Toronto and a Senior Clinician-Scientist at The Hospital for Sick Children. 

He holds the Canada Research Chair in Pediatric Drug Safety and Efficacy (Tier I). Dr. Finkelstein is triple-trained in medical toxicology, clinical pharmacology and pediatric emergency medicine. Since 2016, he has served as a “Thought Leader” for NIH’s Pediatric Trials Network, an alliance of >200 hospitals, working for drug label modifications for children at FDA. He also established and leads the ACMT Pediatric Marijuana & Opioids (PEDMOP) Toxicology Investigators Consortium (ToxIC) sub-registries.

The overarching goal of his research program focuses on optimizing therapeutics and outcomes of sick and injured children in acute care settings and prevention of accidental and intentional drug overdose and subsequent suicide, employing epidemiological, randomized clinical trials and precision tools.

Dr. Holland is Clinical Professor of Emergency Medicine at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, NY where he is on the faculty of the Medical Toxicology Fellowship Training Program and is a Consulting Medical Toxicologist at the Upstate New York Poison Center and the Onondaga County Medical Examiner’s Office-both in Syracuse, NY. Dr. Holland is also the Director of Occupational Medicine for the Saratoga Hospital Medical Group, and is the Saratoga Hospital Employee Health Medical Director, where he oversees the health and safety of over 3100 employees and staff. He also serves as Employee Health Medical Director at Glens Falls Hospital in Glens Falls, NY, covering 2500 employees. He is also Principal Medical Toxicologist at the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health (CTEH) in Little Rock, AR.    

Dr. Filza Hussain is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Associate Program Director for CL fellowship at Stanford University School of Medicine. She holds a Medical Degree from Aga Khan University in Pakistan and completed her residency training at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Dr. Hussain also completed a CL fellowship at Columbia University in New York. With a clinical focus on transplant psychiatry, Dr. Hussain serves as the liaison to the Liver and Kidney transplant programs at Stanford, in this capacity she meets with donors for evaluation, follows up with patients post transplant and is an active member of the transplant selection committee.

Dr. Klotz received his undergraduate degree from the University of Southern California in International Relations, his medical degree from the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and completed his residency in Psychiatry at Naval Medical Center San Diego. He is a member of the Gold Humanism and Alpha Omega Alpha honor societies. He is currently the embedded psychiatric provider for the 5th Marine Regiment in San Clemente California.

Larissa Laskowski is a clinical assistant professor and medical toxicologist at NYU Grossman School of Medicine, and serves as a consultant for the New York City Poison Control Center. She is also cofounder and director of The Prevention Education Partnership (PEP), an initiative dedicated to decreasing the incidence of preventable illness and injury commonly seen in the emergency department. Through PEP Talks, a harm-reduction drug education curriculum, she deploys doctors into local schools to educate middle and high school students, teachers, and parents, in an effort to keep NYC youth safe, healthy, and out of the ER. Due to the rapidly evolving threat of teen fentanyl overdose, she is currently laser-focused on ensuring that every student, teacher, and parent knows how to recognize an opioid overdose and save a life by administering naloxone. 

She currently resides in Manhattan with her husband Mike and two small children Frida and Miles.

Bruno Mégarbane is Professor of critical care medicine at Paris University and directs a research team at INSERM UMRS-1144. He is the Head of the Department of Medical and Toxicological Critical Care at Lariboisière Hospital, Paris, France. He conducted several clinical and experimental studies in clinical toxicology.

Dr. Rasimas has a Jesuit university background in biochemistry, mathematics, and philosophy. He completed the Medical Scientist Training Program, earning a PhD in chemical biology (2002) and MD (2003) from Penn State University. After Psychiatry residency at the Mayo Clinic, he was a clinical fellow at the National Institutes of Health in Washington, DC where he did translational research and trained in medical ethics. He also undertook formal education in psychoanalytic psychotherapy, completed the critical care based medical toxicology fellowship at Penn State, and became certified in Psychosomatic Medicine, Addiction Medicine, and Medical Toxicology. Further work at NIH has included the Undiagnosed Diseases Program and roles in research ethics and oversight. Dr. Rasimas was the Director of Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry and Co-Chair of the Biomedical Ethics Committee at Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota before moving to Prince Edward Island, Canada in 2022. Based at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Charlottetown, he served as the lead Psychiatrist for C-L and Addictions for the province. He has recently transitioned to Nova Scotia Health in an effort to build treatment programs for patients with complex psychosomatic illnesses and substance use. For PEI, Dr. Rasimas remains the Medical Director of the Atlantic Mentorship Network for Chronic Pain, Addictions, and Mental Illness. Dr. Rasimas is a university professor with continued involvement in medical education in both the US and Canada pursuing an academic medical career at the interface of psychosomatic medicine, medical toxicology, and psychodynamic psychotherapy with a primary clinical interest in the phenomenology of suicide.

Dominic Sisti, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Medical Ethics & Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. He directs the Scattergood Program for the Applied Ethics of Behavioral Health Care and holds secondary appointments in the Department of Psychiatry, where he directs the ethics curriculum in the residency program, and the Department of Philosophy. Dr. Sisti examines ethical and policy challenges in mental health care, including long-term psychiatric care for individuals with serious mental illness and clinical ethics issues in correctional settings. Sisti's research also explores ethical issues in psychedelic research and clinical application.