Psychiatr News March 7, 2008
Volume 43, Number 5, page 1
© 2008 American Psychiatric Association
Schatzberg Wins APA Presidency
Ken Hausman
APA's next president-elect will be serving his first term on the Board
of Trustees as will three other victorious candidates. Two Board veterans won
re-election.
APA members have decided to hand the reins of the Association to Stanford
University psychiatrist Alan Schatzberg,
M.D.
Schatzberg, a renowned researcher, president of the Board of Directors of
American Psychiatric Publishing Inc., and a newcomer to APA politics, bested
APA secretary-treasurer Donna Norris, M.D, in the contest to become the next
president-elect. Schatzberg won 59.6 percent of the votes in the 2008
election.
Schatzberg has been chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford
University since 1991 and is familiar to thousands of psychiatrists as
coauthor of the Textbook of Psychopharmacology, a staple of many
residency programs.
In the race for secretary-treasurer, Vermont psychiatrist David Fassler,
M.D., outpolled Burton Reifler, M.D., of North Carolina, winning 59.3 percent
of the vote. Fassler is completing his second three-year term as a
trustee-at-large.
Three candidates were vying to become a trustee-at-large. Dilip Jeste,
M.D., a schizophrenia and geriatric psychiatry researcher in San Diego,
emerged the victor, garnering 51.5 percent of the vote after APA's
"preferential voting system" was used. His opponents were Francis
Lu, M.D., of San Francisco and Ann Marie Sullivan, M.D., of New York.
Under the preferential voting system, which is used in races with more than
one candidate, voters are asked to rank the candidates in the order in which
they would like to see them win. If no candidate garners a majority in the
first round of counting, the candidate with the lowest number of votes is
eliminated—in this case that was Lu—and the second-choice votes on
the ballots cast for him or her are distributed to the remaining candidates.
Jeste received a majority after the redistributed votes were apportioned
between him and Sullivan.
With a trio of candidates competing, the preferential voting mechanism was
also used to determine who the next member-in-training trustee-elect (MITTE)
would be.
The winner was Melinda Fierros, M.D., a PGY-3 resident at Wright State
University in Ohio and a member of the U.S. Air Force. She outpolled Christain
Neal, M.D., a resident at Palmetto Health Alliance/University of South
Carolina, and Scott Shaffer, M.D., a resident at Brown University.
Fierros received 57.3 percent of the votes in the second round of counting
after the votes for Shaffer, who came in third, were redistributed.
Two APA Areas also had trustee elections this year. In Area 2, which
includes all of the New York state district branches, former Assembly Speaker
James Nininger, M.D., bested Seeth Vivek, M.D.
In Area 5, encompassing the South as well as Puerto Rico and the district
branch for psychiatrists in the military, Kentucky psychiatrist Mary Helen
Davis, M.D., was elected to a second term. She defeated Harold Ginzburg, M.D.,
of Louisiana.
Newly elected officers and trustees will take office at the close of APA's
2008 annual meeting in Washington, D.C. Also at that time President-elect Nada
Stotland, M.D., will become president, and the MITTE, Lauren Sitzer, M.D.,
will become member-in-training trustee. (Unlike the member-in-training
trustee, the MITTE does not have a vote on the Board.)
A total of 10,053 members voted in the 2008 election. This represents 31.2
percent of eligible voters, up from 29 percent last year.
About one-third of APA members opted to submit their ballots online this
year, about the same number as in the 2007
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