Donna T. Chen MD, MPH

After completing her undergraduate education at the University of California, Berkeley where she developed her own major studying “Ethical, Political, and Social Aspect of Health and Medicine,” Donna Chen went on to the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley for her medical education and public health education respectively. Dr. Chen received her residency training in Psychiatry at Columbia University / New York State Psychiatric Institute, where she served as Chief Resident. She spent two years with the Southeastern Rural Mental Health Research Center at the University of Virginia , a research center funded by the National Institute of Mental Health to study the mental health service needs of underserved communities, primarily African American, impoverished, and rural communities. She was also a research fellow with the Institute of Law , Psychiatry and Public Policy and a research associate with the Center for Biomedical Ethics. During this time, she served as Associate Scientific Editor and Scientific Consultant for the Surgeon General’s report, Mental Health: Culture, Race, and Ethnicity. Dr. Chen then went to the National Institutes of Health where she received subspecialty training in Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Research Ethics.

Dr. Chen returned to the University of Virginia in 2003 as an Assistant Professor with the Department of Health Evaluation Sciences and the Department of Psychiatric Medicine and joined the Center for Biomedical Ethics in 2005. She remains a Special Volunteer with the National Institute of Mental Health. She has served on several national committees related to clinical and research ethics, including for the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke, National Children’s Study, Academy of Psychosomatic Medicine , and the American Psychiatric Association.