Maria A. Oquendo BS, MD, PhD

Maria A. Oquendo, M.D., Ph.D., is Immediate Past President of the American Psychiatric Association and served as President of APA from 2016 to 2017. Dr. Oquendo is Professor and Chairman of Psychiatry at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She previously served as Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University and Research Psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Dr. Oquendo graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Tufts University in 1980 and received her M.D. from the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University in 1984. She completed her residency training at the Payne Whitney Clinic of New York Hospital Cornell. She received her Ph.D. in Psychiatry from the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in 2010.

Dr. Oquendo areas of expertise include the diagnosis, pharmacologic treatment and neurobiology of bipolar disorder and major depression, with a special focus on suicidal behavior and global mental health. Internationally known for neurobiological studies of suicidal behavior, Dr. Oquendo has used PET and MRI to map brain abnormalities in mood disorders and suicidal behavior, to disambiguate common and divergent biological contributors to each.

In 2003, when issues regarding antidepressants' potential risk for inducing suicidal behavior first arose, Dr. Oquendo and colleagues were commissioned by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to develop a classification system to examine suicide-related events in the data. This system is endorsed by the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and now used worldwide. Oquendo first proposed suicidal behavior should be its own diagnostic category in 2008.