David C. Saunders, MD, PhD

  • Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry
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Overview

Dr. David Saunders, MD, PhD, is a child psychiatrist and researcher. He attended medical school at Weill Cornell Medical College and obtained a PhD at Emory, focusing on contemporary, medicalized incarnations of Buddhist contemplative practices, such as mindfulness. He completed adult psychiatry residency and child and adolescent psychiatry fellowship at Yale, in the Solnit Integrated Training Program. At Yale, under Drs. Hedy Kober and James Leckman, he designed and is presently conducting an RCT of Mindfulness-Based ADHD Treatment for Children (R34 AT009887). At Columbia, as a faculty member in the Center for Intergenerational Psychiatry, he is conducting an RCT of a mindfulness-based intervention for substance use disorder in adolescents, assessing feasibility and acceptability of the intervention, and examining behavioral and neural mechanisms of cognitive control with task-based fMRI. He also studies the intersection of religiosity/spirituality and mental health.

Academic Appointments

  • Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry

Gender

  • Male