Kristopher Kast MD

Dr. Kast is Program Director for the Vanderbilt Addiction Psychiatry Fellowship, developing the curriculum, supervising diverse and deep clinical exposure, and supporting an intensive scholarship for the fellows. He also leads the Tennessee State Opioid Response Project ECHO Tele-Education Hub, a partnership between VUMC and TDMHSAS targeting community clinicians and health systems caring for individuals with opioid use disorder.

Dr. Kast joined the Vanderbilt faculty in 2020 after fellowship training in addiction psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Brigham's hospitals. He trained in general adult psychiatry at Weill Cornell and New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where he served as chief resident and concurrently completed his first year of psychoanalytic training at Columbia. Before this postgraduate work, he graduated summa cum laude from Notre Dame and was elected to the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Medical Society at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. Kast is originally from the Ohio River valley of rural southern Indiana and northern Kentucky.