Michael Silverman, PhD
I am a Licensed Psychologist, a cognitive scientist, and an educator. I completed my clinical
training with a specialization in head injury and rehabilitation. During this experience, I decided
to pursue a cognitive sciences degree to understand brain function better. I completed my
doctoral work in the cognitive sciences at The New School for Social Research, where I was
awarded the Irving Rock Memorial Dissertation Award and earned a three-year NIH-funded
postdoc at Harvard University. When my mentor chose to relocate to the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign after my first postdoc year, I decided to relocate back to New York for a
fellowship in neuropsychiatry at the Weill Medical School of Cornell University.
Since joining the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, I have maintained a neuropsychiatric
research lab and a small clinical practice as a licensed psychologist. Last year, Doximity.com
listed me as the third most-searched-for psychologist in New York and a “Top 10% cited
clinician.”
It was through my clinical work that I was first exposed to postpartum psychosis. This profound
experience led to the refocusing of our lab in 2007 towards perinatal mental health disorders and
the development of local, national, and international research collaborations, including with the
Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, and Haifa University in Israel. These efforts have
received considerable professional, public policy, foundation, and lay attention worldwide, and
we are regularly cited in regional, national, and international media outlets. Our work also led to
facilitating a universal postpartum depression screening program at Mount Sinai Hospital’s
Obstetrics and Gynecology Ambulatory Clinic that was later endorsed by the NYC Maternal
Depression Collaborative and implemented by the Greater New York Hospital Collaborative, a
network of over 240 hospitals across New York State. Notably, after being recognized by the
David and Lucile Packard Foundation, our universal screening program has developed into a
national model for universal postpartum screening initiatives. To date, we have screened over
twenty thousand high-risk Mount Sinai Hospital patients and have established a continually
expanding robust postpartum mental health registry for future research. More recently our work has begun to explore the long-term childhood outcomes associated with
perinatal mental health disorders.
