September 16, 2014 - Lama Bazzi, MD joined the faculty of the Department of Psychiatry in July to take over the Assisted Outpatient Treatment (AOT) Program from Marsha Tanenberg Karant, MD and to see patients and train residents in the outpatient department. “This position offers me an opportunity to pursue all my eclectic interests,” Dr. Bazzi said, referring to her interests in forensic psychiatry, residency training and community psychiatry.
Born in Lebanon and educated in Saudi Arabia and Switzerland, Dr. Bazzi completed medical school and a research fellowship at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, before completing a residency in Psychiatry at SUNY Downstate Medical Center.
While a resident, she served as an American Psychiatric Association (APA) Leadership Fellow. She joined the APA Council on Psychiatry and the Law where she served as a forensic advisor to the DSM-5 development process and participated in drafting an amici brief for the United States Supreme Court. She was appointed President of the Leadership Fellowship program, which entitled her to a non-voting membership in the APA Board of Trustees and provided a front row view of the DSM-5 approval process.
Following her residency, she continued to pursue her interest in the law by completing a fellowship in Forensic Psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio where she studied with Phillip Resnick, MD, a leading expert in the assessment of violence risk.
At Stony Brook, Dr. Bazzi will spend half her time as a consulting psychiatrist to the Suffolk County District Court, providing expert testimony on petitions by the county under Kendra’s Law to mandate outpatient treatment for people with mental illness. Dr. Bazzi has reviewed all 160 active cases that she inherited from Dr. Karant and begun performing her own evaluations. The other half of her time will be devoted to seeing patients and supervising residents in the adult outpatient service. She looks forward to sharing her expertise in forensics with the residents and eventually developing a private forensic psychiatry practice, with a mix of both criminal and civil cases. She also has her eye on potential research projects leveraging the department’s neuroimaging expertise to explore the biological bases of violence and its mitigation in clinical practice.