Shirshendu Sinha PGY-1
Ajay Shah PGY-1
Christine Miller PGY-2
Ana Morais PGY-3
Naila Azhar PGY-4 (Chief Resident)
Sarah Masood PGY-4 (Outpatient Chief Resident)

 

Shirshendu Sinha, MD
PGY-1

Hi there, my name is Shirshendu Sinha, and I am a first year resident at the University of Connecticut School of Medicine’s Psychiatry Residency Program. I was born and raised in Kolkata, of Mother Teresa fame, in India. After graduating from the North Bengal Medical College and Hospital, India, I practiced medicine in various capacities for a couple of years before my research interests brought me to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota.  There, I embarked on a post-doctoral fellowship for 2 years until I began my career as a psychiatric resident at the University of Connecticut.

The overall objective of my research was to document the prevalence of psychiatric illness in a population preparing for hematopoietic stem cell transplantation, and to relate their mental health to their disease-specific and transplant-specific prognostic factors. My current interests in psychiatry are the psychiatric aspects of organ transplantation including pre-transplant screening, living organ donation, noncompliance, and quality of life issues following transplantation.

I am really thrilled and excited to be embarking on my career as a psychiatrist, since July of this year.  As a leading institution in the training of psychiatric residents, the University of Connecticut offers unique opportunities to work in a challenging and dynamic academic environment.  I believe this program will leave me well-suited to pursue a productive academic career in the field of psychiatry and psychosomatic medicine.

 

 

Ajay Shah, MD
PGY-1

Hi, my name is Ajay Shah. I am a first year resident and I recently moved to Connecticut from Chicago, Illinois (go Bulls and Bears!), after graduating from Ross University School of Medicine. My wife and I couples matched here at UConn -  she with Internal Medicine and I with Psychiatry. The couples match can often be stressful, but the program did a great job in making the logistics of such a process seamless which meant a lot to us both.

It has now been 2 months since we started and I have done Neurology and the JDH Special. I am looking forward to starting Inpatient Psychiatry next month. The JDH Special is a one month rotation for first year residents and it is something unique to UConn. The rotation helps to provide a more solid understanding of various parts integral to psychiatry. It consists of strategic interviewing techniques, neuropsychiatric testing, psychiatric rating scales training, exposure to Huntington's Disease patients in the HD Clinic, ECT observation, as well as partial hospitalization and dual diagnosis clinics. The best part of all this is that this month is purely educational and you carry no patients. This rotation helps you learn new skills that will be beneficial for the rest of your training.

In terms of the area, Farmington has all the amenities of a big city. We often have time to go to Blueback Square in West Hartford to enjoy a night out on the town, and for those of you that love shopping, there is no shortage of malls, grocery stores, and amazing restaurants. The UConn Psychiatry Residency is a wonderful program and I have been very pleased.

 

Christine Miller, DO
PGY-2

My name is Christine Miller, and I am part of the 2014 resident class.  Last summer I made the move to West Hartford from Chicago, where I received my medical school training.  While I love the City of Broad Shoulders, I earned my undergraduate degree from Boston University and I have an appreciation for New England.  I looked at UConn first because of the location, but realized it had a lot of what I was looking for in a residency program.

There is an excitement in being a part of a larger university setting.  I have very much enjoyed teaching the medical students, working alongside interns from all specialties of medicine and interacting with attendings, who are dedicated to medical education and research.  The Addictions and Psychopharmacology research are another valued strength in the program.  I was drawn to the strong biological and evidence-based emphasis.  Support and resources for research are available, yet I have not felt pressured to weigh my career in that direction.

During my first year, I was encouraged to develop a personal and authentic interviewing style.  I have been pleasantly surprised by the many Psychodynamically oriented attendings and supervisors available to provide insight into the many diverse patient interactions.  This year, I look forward to starting outpatient Psychotherapy and developing my professional interests more, including Women’s Behavioral Health, Psychosomatic Medicine and Addictions.

As for the area, it has not let me down.  Yoga is one of my passions and besides being only an hour and a half from the Kripalu Center, there a few wonderful studios within 15 minutes.  I even took a master class by Ana Forrest in West Hartford.  I often take my dogs on one of the many trails in the area on free weekends.  On more adventurous weekends I’ve been rafting and hiking in the Berkshires, skiing in Vermont, roaming in NYC, and the CT coast and of course back to Boston.

 

Ana Paula Morais, MD
PGY-3

My name is Ana Paula Morais and I am a PGY-3 in the University of Connecticut Psychiatric Residency Program. As a third year resident, most of your responsibility is focused in the outpatient setting. My week consists of 5 half-day clinics that cover a wide range of outpatient psychiatric services, from an inner city community clinic to a methadone clinic to a child depression clinic to a forensic clinic. Fridays are reserved for grand rounds and didactics and the remaining time is left to us to schedule our individual psychotherapy, CBT, and family therapy patients as well as meet with our supervisors. We also have a light in-house call duty; our role on call is mainly supervisory and teaching as we are paired up with an intern for all calls.

The psychiatry program here at UConn really prepares its residents for a future as an independent practitioner; while there is ample supervision, you are definitely given the opportunity to formulate your own assessment and plan with your patients and lead team meetings. The learning curve is steep and by the end of your intern year you will be amazed at how much you have grown and how much more comfortable you feel practicing psychiatry. Additionally, you will be exposed to a wide breadth of psychopathology from psychosis to mood to substance abuse disorders. I am interested in inner city community based psychiatry and the program here emphasizes providing care to psychiatric populations in need. Whatever interest you may have, the program offers flexibility in determining what areas to focus on throughout your residency be it either during your research or planning for your clinics.

Apart from a really great education, you will be a part of a really close knit group of residents. We all get along great and often hang out after work or on the weekends. We like to have fun and we are often asked by the social workers (who share a wall with our resident room) to keep the laughing down!

 

Naila Azhar, MD MPH
PGY-4 (Chief Resident)

Thank you for taking a moment to read our website. I represent a team of extremely competent, highly energetic, well-trained psychiatry residents. At UCHC, we consider our clinical work as an opportunity to help our patients in their most vulnerable moments. As one of my patients “Miss C” once told me, “You trust your mind to guide you through ups and downs of your life. If you have lost your touch with reality once in your lifetime, it is awfully hard to trust your mind again”. We are driven by our commitment to help people like “Miss C”. We work with our patients for a better understanding of biological, psychological, and social underpinning of their behavior and mental illness. We are taught interview techniques to build a rapport with our patients and develop therapeutic alliances very early in our residency training. It develops a very strong foundation to be effective psychiatrists who follow a patient centered approach. We have been taught to develop the patience and the wisdom to invest in therapeutic relationships with our patients and to foster hope and faith. We base our practice on scientific evidence, and we measure change by objective tools like PHQ 9. We are taught how to read and critique scientific journals and modify our clinical practices based on new scientific knowledge.

I would like to take a few minutes to talk about my background. After my medical school education, I had training in Public Health at Emory University. I worked in Health Policy for several years. My work in Health Policy kept me engaged with World Health Organization, United Nations Emergency Fund for Children, United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization and other UN agencies who are committed to promoting health across the globe. Universality of the stigma that is attached to mental health and that is witnessed by psychiatrists is not seen in any other specialty of medicine. There is also a dearth of competent, committed well-trained psychiatrists who can use their clinical judgment and their public health knowledge to transform current misconceptions about mental health. Our program has a unique emphasis on training residents in contemporary health systems and public psychiatry. It offers a rich training curriculum that includes training in history and evolution of Health Care in U.S, Organized Psychiatry and Managed Care, Quality Improvement in Psychiatry, Medical Ethics and the Rationing of Health Care, and prevention and treatment in Children and Adolescents, Adults and geriatric population in real world context.

UCHC is a university-based program that offers an intellectually challenging environment, exposure to state of the art technology to treat psychiatric disorder, e.g. Deep Brian Stimulation, and be actively engaged in clinical research. UHCH offers clinical rotations during PGY III in community clinics where we examine and treat a diverse set of patient population who represent all socioeconomic groups and have a broad range of Axis I and II disorders. Our didactics are based on a well thought, well planned road map that introduces graded complex topics that match with levels of training or residents and have the flexibility to take into account individual skills and knowledge base of residents.

Our program offers a well-balanced emphasis on psychopharmacology and psychotherapy. Residents are involved in developing training curriculum and training junior residents and medical students. Our program is resident focused. It values its residents. It defines residents by their strengths, and not by their weaknesses. We focus on objectivity, competence, professionalism, and team spirit. Our attendings have fostered in us a spirit to uphold time tested, age old oath to treat the ill to the best of our ability, to preserve a patient's privacy, and to share the pearls we learn about the practice of psychiatry with the next generation of psychiatric residents.

 

 

Sarah Masood, MD
PGY-4 (Outpatient Chief Resident)

Hello, I am Sarah Masood, a PGY-IV psychiatry resident and the outpatient chief resident. I was born in Iran, and after finishing high school, I enrolled in Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences, ranked amongst the best medical schools in Iran. Like many other psychiatrists I first developed an interest in this field during a medical school rotation. I was, and still am, fascinated by people’s behaviors, both normal and abnormal, and in learning about the “fine line” between the two.  Following medical school, I came to the USA, landing in Connecticut, and have been living here ever since.  I find this to be a rich, elegant, and beautiful state. I have traveled extensively in the US, but I can say with certainty that I have not seen as much beauty anywhere else. This, and being close to New York City, was just part of the reason why I chose to rank UCONN highly.

Our residency program’s strengths lie in a strong tradition of psychopharmacology, alongside an early introduction to psychotherapy. Residents benefit from staffing psychotherapy cases with formally trained analysts and psychodynamically oriented supervisors from the area. Our patient population draws from the diversity of the surrounding greater Hartford area, including patients of various ethnicities and socioeconomic levels, suffering from all sorts of psychiatric disorders. If you are interested in research, you have the opportunity to work with some well-known researchers. Our residents have gone on to present posters at national and international conferences.

I am a person with many interests and am thankful to this program for fostering my many different interests and for helping me find the appropriate resources. I was recently accepted as a “candidate” to the Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis to commence long-term training in psychoanalysis.

And even with all this, I also find time to swim. My goal is to become a lifeguard, so I swim a rigorous 100 laps (equal to 2.3 KM or 1.4 miles) a day on occasions. Here at UConn, we work hard and we play just as hard!

We are looking for motivated candidates with strong academic backgrounds and mature personalities with willingness to be a part of a hard working team of high achievers. Hope to see you here and take care!

 

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