2024-2025 NNCI Scholars
Ashna is a final year psychiatry registrar (aka ‘resident’) based in Sydney, Australia, working in public hospital psychiatry. She is currently the senior registrar to the Chief Psychiatrist of New South Wales. Ashna is a board director of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatry (the Aus/NZ equivalent of the American Psychiatric Association) and serves as the Chair of the young branch (<40) of the Medical Women’s International Association. She has a wide range of professional interests including the physical health of people with serious mental illness, system design and equity. In 2024 she was invited by the United Nations' President of the General Assembly to speak at the Commission on the Status of Women in New York. Ashna has utilised NNCI’s resources to help provide psychoeducation to patients in a range of psychiatric settings. Her NNCI submission focused on fun ways to teach and test, including a neuroscience-themed crossword that she created as an exam preparation resource. She writes regular medical crosswords for NSW Doctor magazine, for teams to complete together over coffee.
Sam grew up in Buffalo Grove, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He earned a Bachelor of Arts in Spanish and a Bachelor of Science in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior from the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities. Sam spent a year doing biochemical research at the Weizmann Institute of Science before returning to the US to attend medical school at the University of Illinois College of Medicine at Chicago. Sam received general psychiatry training at Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood, IL. His clinical interests include psychodynamic psychotherapy, eating disorders, and neuropsychiatry. He is passionate about medical education and improving accessibility for students with disabilities. Outside of work, Sam enjoys reading horror fiction, learning about paleontology, watching musical theater, and spending time with his dog, Louis.
Shivani Bhatt is currently a consultation-liaison psychiatry fellow at NYU School of Medicine. Drawing on her background in PET brain imaging research in PTSD, Shivani brings her passion for neuroscience to everyday psychiatric consults where biology meets psychiatric illness and psychological health. She finds that the principles of adult learning from her time as an NNCI ambassador have not only helped her develop neuroscience-based psychiatry modules for trainees, but are used every day when she engages in psychoeducation with patients and non-psychiatry team members. As a Webb Fellow, she is excited to conduct research in chronic pain and psychiatric comorbidity and to tell the story of data as they emerge.
Dr. Aviva K. Olsavsky, MD, is an Associate Professor and a perinatal, child and substance use psychiatrist at the University of Colorado. She is a graduate of Harvard College and UCLA School of Medicine. She has completed an NIH clinical research fellowship, as well as child psychiatry, infant mental health, and postdoctoral research fellowships. Her clinical work includes integrated care and access building consultation for perinatal mental health. Her NIH-funded research program investigates the impact of maternal cannabis use and mothers’ early adverse experiences on neural responses to infant cues and relationships with their infants. She has designed innovative virtual educational programming for new-parent psychiatry trainees in collaboration with the NNCI and has collaborated with the American Heart Association to co-create psychoeducational content with faith-based institutions serving communities of color. In seeking to understand the mechanisms by which stress and substance use act on the parental brain, Dr. Olsavsky hopes to improve preventive and treatment approaches to impact the mental health of multiple generations.
Dr. Kelly Chen completed psychiatry residency at the University of Michigan after receiving her undergraduate degree at Stanford University and medical degree at UAB Heersink School of Medicine. Throughout her career, she has published numerous peer-reviewed articles at the intersection of neurology and psychiatry and presented her work at national and international conferences. Her areas of interest include youth burnout, student mental health, and child development. Dr. Chen has a passion for working with youth and is completing child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at the University of Michigan.