Alvaro Camacho MD, MPH

Dr. Camacho graduated from medical school in 1997 at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (Xavier University) in Bogota, Colombia. He did his independent student project in 1996 and Research as a Visiting Scholar in 1998 at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) School of Medicine under the supervision of Dr. Joel Dimsdale, MD, former editor-in-chief of Psychosomatic Medicine. Dr. Camacho finished his training in Psychiatry at UCSD, where he obtained the Chairman-s Research Award.

In addition, he obtained the Minority Fellowship Award from American Psychiatric and a Developmental Grant from the HIV Neurobehavioral Research Center. He collaborated in a variety of research projects with several world-wide recognized faculty from the Department of Psychaitry at UCSD.

After practicing psychiatry in his native Colombia, Dr. Camacho, with the support of Dr Ng, moved back to the United States and started working at Sun Valley Behavioral Medical Center and Imperial County Behavioral Health, where he is currently the Medical Director.

Dr. Camacho and Dr Ng started the first comprehensive clinical research center in Imperial Valley with the collaboration of the Department of Psychiatry at UCSD.

Dr. Camacho is an affiliated faculty with the Department of Psychiatry at UCSD, the International Mood Center under the direction of Dr. Hagop Akiskal, the Hartford Center of Excellence in Geriatric Psychiatry Research under the direction of Dr. Dilip Jeste and the UCSD Clinical Trials Center of Excellence under the direction of Dr. Jim Lohr and Dr. David Feifel. Dr. Camacho has published in several topics in Psychiatry. His area of interest is the epidemiology of the different comorbidities between mood and anxiety disorders among Hispanics living in Rural Southern California.