Dr. Dahyeon Kang is an Assistant Professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine. She earned her doctoral degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where her work focused on the etiology of alcohol and substance use disorders through multimodal research methods, including alcohol administration, neuroimaging, transdermal biosensors, and ecological momentary assessments. At the University of Washington’s Department of Psychiatry, Dr. Kang investigates how individual and social factors interact to influence alcohol and cannabis use behaviors.
I am an Acting Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington. I received my MD, MPH from the University of Nebraska Medical Center and completed my adult residency at the University of Washington where I was chief resident. I then went on to complete a fellowship in Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry at the University of Washington. I am currently on faculty at Harborview Medical Center on the inpatient psychiatry unit and inpatient psychiatry consult service. I have a longstanding interest in the intersection between medicine and psychiatry and in working with people who suffer from serious mental illness and treatment-resistant conditions. I have clinical interests in ECT, psychopharmacology, co-morbid medical conditions, and adjunctive psychotherapies. I value caring for the whole person through thorough and accurate diagnosis, treating co-morbid medical conditions, and minimizing medications when possible. I have teaching interests in reducing stigma surrounding serious mental illness and educating residents and medical students about psychiatric care.
Dr. Charles Engel (he/him) is Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine, Core VA HSR&D Investigator in the Seattle Center for Innovation, Codirector of the Center’s Advanced Fellowship on Learning Health Systems, and Adjunct Physician Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation. Engel’s work focuses on trauma-informed health systems and strategies for improving the quality of primary care for chronic mental and physical health conditions. His research has covered traumatic injury and post-trauma syndromes ranging from blast injury, mild traumatic brain injury and Gulf War syndrome to PTSD and depression. Engel is experienced at mixed qualitative and quantitative methods and has led large pragmatic randomized trials, program evaluations, and implementation science studies. He has authored or coauthored nearly 200 scholarly papers, including in the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and the American Journal of Psychiatry. Funding for his work has come from the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control, Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Defense and other organizations. Before joining UW Psychiatry and the AIMS Center in 2021, Dr. Engel was Senior Physician Policy Researcher at the RAND Corporation from 2013 to 2020 and Associate Chair (Research) at Uniformed Services University’s Department of Psychiatry from 2001-2013. Engel has served on the board of directors of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, has testified twice before Congress, received a number of awards, and delivered invited lectures in over 10 countries. He received both his MD and MPH from the University of Washington.
My work focuses on the diagnosis and treatment of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), and neurodegenerative dementias, as well as applications of positron emission tomography (PET) and other functional neuroimaging modalities to elucidating the pathophysiology of PTSD, mTBI, Alzheimer’s Disease, and other neurodegenerative dementias.
The Hendrickson research group explores underlying biological mechanisms related to the development and maintenance of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related conditions, including mild traumatic brain injury, as well as the potential for interaction between different types of stress and trauma. Through the design and implementation of translational clinical studies, we apply this work directly to the pursuit of new treatment options for people who have experienced a traumatic stress.
A primary goal of our team is to understand broadly the ways traumatic stress interferes with people’s lives, and to prioritize the areas of greatest clinical need. We look for ways to prevent persistent symptoms after trauma, to match patients more quickly to the treatment options that will be most effective for them as individuals, and to develop new treatment options for those for whom current options are simply not adequate.
In addition to my research work, I am a staff psychiatrist in the VA PTSD Outpatient Clinic and a member of the VA Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) Team, and provide teaching and mentorship for residents in the UW Psychiatry Training Program.
Personal Statement
I focus on neurodegeneration and traumatic brain injury research at the VA Puget Sound and at the UW Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center.
My work has probed the ‘glymphatic’ system, a brain-wide network of perivascular spaces that facilitates the clearance of waste products, including amyloid beta and tau, from the brain interstitium during sleep. Previously at OHSU, my group demonstrated that the glymphatic system fails in the aging brain and in the young brain after traumatic brain injury. The studies suggest that impairment of glymphatic function may be one factor that renders the aging brain vulnerable to protein aggregation and neurodegeneration and may link brain trauma early in life with the development of dementia in the decades that follow. My ongoing work seeks to define the molecular and cellular underpinnings of impaired glymphatic function in the aging and post-traumatic brain, and to use novel MRI-based imaging approaches to extend these findings into clinical Alzheimer’s disease and post-traumatic populations.
As the leader of the ADRC’s new Research Education Component, I oversee the effort to train and develop a community of clinical, basic and translational Alzheimer’s disease researchers with the necessary clinical, scientific and technical competence to effectively collaborate to define the mechanistic and biological underpinnings of Alzheimer’s and related dementia, and to translate this understanding to improve the lives of those living with memory loss and dementia.
Personal Statement
Douglas Zatzick, M.D. is currently a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at University of Washington School of Medicine. Over the past two decades, he has developed a public health approach to trauma-focused research and clinical work that has emphasized clinical epidemiologic, functional outcome, and early intervention studies of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and related co-morbid conditions. From 2009-2012, he served as Chairperson of the National Institute of Mental Health, Services in Non-specialty settings (NIMH, SRNS) Study Section. He served on the congressionally mandated United States Institute of Medicine four-year ongoing assessment of PTSD treatment, and the World Health Organization PTSD Guideline Development Group. He has participated in disaster relief and early intervention efforts after Hurricane Katrina and the January 2010 Haiti earthquake. He was medical director of the University of Washington’s Harborview Level 1 Trauma Center Psychiatric Consultation Liaison Service, and in this capacity provided front-line clinical services to ethno-culturally diverse acutely injured trauma survivors. As a part of multidisciplinary collaborative group that includes empiricist trauma surgical policy makers, he is working to use clinical trial results to influence policy for PTSD screening and intervention at trauma centers throughout the United States.
