After a nationwide search, we’re pleased to announce that David Ruskin, MD, has been appointed the Associate Chief of Staff for Mental Health at the VA Puget Sound Health Care System. Dr. Ruskin has served as Acting Associate Chief of Staff for almost two years. Before that, he served as his facility’s chief of psychiatry. He has done a terrific job of deepening connections between our VA-based faculty and programs and other people and programs in our department. Dr. Ruskin is a board-certified psychiatrist with board-certifications in Psychiatry, Psychosomatic Medicine, and Brain-Injury Medicine.

Prior to joining the VA, Dr. Ruskin was an assistant professor of clinical medicine at the USC Keck School of Medicine. While at USC, Dr. Ruskin co-developed a psychosomatic-medicine fellowship program in partnership with the West Los Angeles VA. Following the program’s successful accreditation, Dr. Ruskin continued on as the fellowship’s associate program director. For the nearly three years that Dr. Ruskin spent at USC, he served as director of psychiatric consultation and liaison services at the LAC+USC Medical Center in Los Angeles, CA. In the last year, he took on the additional role of director of psychiatric emergency services with the psychiatric emergency room at LAC+USC being one of the busiest of its kind in the United States. In his earlier career, Dr. Ruskin served on faculty at the David-Geffen UCLA School of Medicine. While with UCLA, he served as director of psychiatric emergency services for UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute & Hospital and later as director of psychiatric emergency services for Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.