Scientific Advisor

Mark Olfson, MD, MPH, professor of clinical psychiatry, is a mental health services researcher and research psychiatrist at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He graduated from Northwestern University Medical School, completed psychiatric residency training at Yale University School of Medicine and then completed a National Institutes of Health post-doctoral research fellowship in mental health services research at Princeton and Rutgers universities. For the past 16 years, he has been on the full-time faculty of the Department of Psychiatry at the College of Physicians & Surgeons at Columbia University.

Dr. Olfson currently directs studies on the delivery of mental health services in community settings with an emphasis on the pharmaco-epidemiology of mood and psychotic disorders. He has published more than 240 papers and provides expert consult to the World Health Organization, the NIH, and the American Psychiatric Institute for Research & Education. His research interests focus on patterns and trends in the utilization of mental health services and quality of care with an emphasis on the treatment of patients with severe mental disorders. Dr. Olfson serves as co-director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s Center for Education and Research on Mental Health Therapeutics and as director of the Research Network Development Core of the National Institute of Mental Health Advanced Center for Intervention and Services Research for Pediatric Psychiatry Disorders.