Melissa Abraham, Ph.D.


Assistant Professor of of Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry, Part-time
Harvard Medical School
Psychologist
Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital
Non-MD Cln Inves, Asst Prf, EF
Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital
PhD Northwestern University 2002
behavioral medicine; behavioral research; clinical ethics; depression; drug prescriptions; eating disoders; emergency services psychiatric; epidemiology; ethics; financial management; human subjects research; international research; medical ethics; mental disorders; physician's practice patterns; psychotropic drugs; public health After completing a two-year master’s in epidemiology at HSPH in 1997, I studied clinical psychology and received a PhD from Northwestern University Medical School. I completed my internship at Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School, and then did a post-doctoral fellowship at the MGH Institute for Health Policy. During my postdoc, I became increasingly interested in research ethics – about maximizing the quality of research design in observational and experimental clinical research when asking people to participate in research, and the relationship between researcher and participants. I joined the Partners Human Research Committee (the Institutional Review Board for Partners HealthCare) as a panel member. It became clear to me right away that my background in epidemiology and my clinical and research training helped me tremendously in ethical considerations. In 2004, I completed the HMS Fellowship in Medical Ethics, and became a Chairperson for the IRB, a half time position, with a primary role of reviewing minimal risk research, including the areas of epidemiology and public health, international research, behavioral sciences, and health services research.