Condition: Adult psychiatry/psychology

Randall Espinoza

I am currently the Medical Director at the Garvey Institute Center for Neuromodulation and am providing leadership to help grow our portfolio in the area of Neuromodulation and Interventional Psychiatry. Before coming to the UW, I was the Muriel Harris Chair of Geriatric Psychiatry and Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at UCLA. While at UCLA, I held many administrative, clinical and teaching leadership positions including serving as Medical Director of Inpatient Geriatric Psychiatry, Chief of Staff of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Hospital, Founding Faculty of the UCLA Neuromodulation Division, Medical Director of the ECT and Interventional Psychiatry Program, among others.

I recently became Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of ECT and Related Therapies, the official publication of the International Society of ECT and Neurostimulation. My research projects have included investigating various neuromodulation and interventional therapies and developing novel educational programs and curricula. I have an abiding interest in mentoring and helping faculty at the start of their careers and a commitment to fostering the advancement of women and underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in academic medicine.

Susanne Weber

I am a consult psychiatrist and clinical instructor at the Fred Hutch Cancer Center. I work with people undergoing active cancer care. I previously practiced in the VA outpatient mental health clinic with veterans with mood disorders, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, and chronic and serious mental illness. I recently worked as a consult psychiatrist with the Swedish Primary Care Clinics, address a wide variety of concerns in a collaborative behavioral health care setting. I enjoy being a part of medical education, both learning and teaching. However, patient care always comes first.

Daniel W. Fisher

My clinical and research interests center around behavioral and psychological symptoms that present in neurodegenerative diseases, especially dementias. Though dementia is well-known to affect one’s memory and cognition, over 90% of people with dementia develop new neuropsychiatric symptoms – including apathy, dysphoria. anxiety, aggression, agitation, disinhibition, hallucinations, and delusions. Despite the ubiquity of these symptoms, very little is known about how they develop in dementia. My research interests are in understanding more about the molecular and cellular mechanisms of neuropsychiatric symptoms in dementia beyond the well-studied changes associated with cognitive deficits.

Along with my research mentor Martin Darvas PhD (Department of Laboratory Medicine and Pathology), we employ numerous approaches to better understand these neuropsychiatric symptoms, including techniques involving transcriptomic analyses of human and mouse post-mortem tissue, development and implementation of biomarkers derived from human and animal model fluids (plasma, serum, cerebrospinal fluid), virally-mediated gene manipulations, animal modeling of cognitive and neuropsychiatric phenotypes, and basic cellular and molecular biology techniques.

Jacqueline Hobbs

I recently joined the faculty at UW and am the new program director for the general residency program. I am excited to be here! I have been working in graduate medical education and have been a program director for over 14 years. Although my major focus is graduate medical education, I am also passionate about patient safety, quality improvement, and healthcare risk management. Additionally, I have a background in basic research with expertise in virology, microbiology, and immunology.

Julia Brechbiel

Areas of clinical practice:

SLU at Fred Hutch Cancer Center and UW Diabetes Institute

My passion and background are working with individuals with serious medical conditions, primarily cancer but also other chronic health conditions. I split my clinical time between FHCC and UW Diabetes Institute. I also passionate about conducting research about existential distress and post-traumatic growth in oncology.

Clinical Approach:

I practice an interpersonal approach to psychotherapy, rather than solely structured one. I enjoy building a collaborative relationship with my patients to identify goals to work on in therapy. I really want our time together to be worthwhile. There’s only so much time and energy someone with a major illness has. I am a big fan of the spoon theory and don’t want to be wasting their spoons. I love to use humor, metaphor and stories. I also find it important to provide space and opportunities to discuss heavier topics related to prognosis, morality, grief and legacy. I enjoy supporting patients with  meaning making and trying to answer difficult questions such as “What’s the meaning of all this? How can we help patients live well with what life is remaining?”

Personal History:

I have a small, supportive family with my partner and our dog. Growing up, I was close with my grandparents. My grandfather who lived with Parkinson’s disease for most of my life. Parkinson’s has a lot of physical symptoms, but also mood symptoms. Additionally, he also lived with chronic melanoma and prostate cancer. His health had a large impact on his life, our family, and how I now view quality of life during treatment and at end of life. He always faced challenges and changes in his functioning with humor and creative to continue to engage in active he enjoyed like travel, golf and a fancy meal. Around the time I started graduate school for psychology, he passed away. His legacy influenced me work with people who were living with serious medical conditions or acquired new disability. I want to help patients live with it instead of against it.

Evan Taniguchi

I am trained in both adult and child and adolescent psychiatry. I have been part of the University of Washington and the Seattle Children’s Hospital psychiatry and behavioral medicine faculty since August 2022. Prior to moving to Seattle, I had spent much of my training and career in my hometown of Honolulu, Hawaii. In addition to clinical care, I enjoy medical education and teaching. I am currently part of the Behavioral Health Integration Program as a consultant psychiatrist in the Fremont and Shoreline UW Primary Care Clinics and the Partnership Access Line (PAL) service for primary care doctors currently servicing Washington, Alaska and Wyoming. I am certified by the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology in both Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

Christina N. Clayton

Christina has been in the behavioral health field since 1993, primarily serving adults who live with severe mental health issues, substance use, experience chronic homelessness, suffer from poor physical health, trauma and any number of co-occurring issues.

Prior to joining UW in 2018, she spent 25 years working in and managing numerous clinical programs including: HIV/AIDS housing and health care, school-based mental health, substance use outreach and treatment, homeless mental health outreach, intensive case management, assertive community treatment, crisis respite, integrated care, housing first and other evidence-based practices.  She has provided licensure supervision, training and consultation, and has worked on multi-disciplinary teams in a number of settings.  She highly values her years of clinical direct service and program management experience.

She has also been involved with the UW School of Social Work since getting her MSW, working with dozens of graduate and undergraduate students, teaching courses and workshops, presenting on panels.  She has served as a Practicum Instructor, the Interim Assistant Dean and Director of Field Education, and is currently is a Clinical Associate Professor teaching in the MSW program.

Starting in fall 2024, Christina became one of the Co-Directors of the Pacific West HUB for Mental Health Implementation Support (CMHIS), led by Stanford’s Center for Dissemination and Implementation (CDI). The CMHIS project builds the capacity to select and implement evidence-supported practices and programs, sharing pragmatic, accessible guidance.

Since 2023, she has served as Co-Chair for the PBSCI Department’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Staff Committee, also having been a member since it’s inception in 2021.

From 2018-2024, Christina was the Co-Director of the Northwest MHTTC, a SAMHSA-funded regional training & TA center.  Christina co-directed the team and helped plan and oversee training for the mental health workforce in HHS Region 10 (AK/ID/OR/WA).  Activities include live webinars, research/practice briefs, online self-paced courses, learning communities and intensive cohort-based training. Most of this training was conducted virtually in collaboration with numerous faculty, instructional designers and presenters.

She is grateful to all the staff and faculty who choose to work in this field, as it is their collective energy, passion, dedication and commitment to social justice that supports the people we serve and brings real change to our communities.  Most importantly, she is honored to work with people who every day, live their experience and share their journey through advocacy as they strive for a world where behavioral health is adequately supported and everyone can thrive equitably.

Katherine Walukevich-Dienst

Dr. Walukevich-Dienst (hear my name) is a licensed clinical psychologist and an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington.

Her research is focused on identifying psychosocial and contextual factors associated with alcohol and cannabis misuse and co-use among young adults, including social influences (e.g., romantic partners, use partnerships), affect management motives, co-occurring mental health concerns, and high-risk substance use events and contexts.

Dr. Walukevich-Dienst aims to leverage this information to develop and test innovative, technology-informed prevention and intervention efforts to  disseminate in real world settings.

She also provides psychotherapy to patients at the University of Washington’s Outpatient Psychiatry Clinic and provides supervision and training to psychology graduate students and psychiatry residents in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

Link to Dr. Walukevich-Dienst’s CV.