Dr. Melissa Rae Arbuckle, MD, PhD

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 is a national leader in residency training in psychiatry and is a past-president of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training (AADPRT). Dr. Arbuckle's academic 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. This program, “Priming the Pump: Training Physician-Scientists in Translational Psychiatry,” 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 Senior Director 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 AADPRT. Dr. Arbuckle is also a member of the steering committee 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.