Paul S. Appelbaum, M.D., the Elizabeth K. Dollard Professor of Psychiatry, Medicine and Law, and Director, Division of Law, Ethics and Psychiatry at Columbia was previously A.F. Zeleznik Distinguished Professor and Chairman, Department of Psychiatry; and Director, Law and Psychiatry Program, University of Massachusetts Medical School. He is currently Chair of APA's Committee on Judicial Action and a member of the Standing Committee on Ethics or the World Psychiatric Association. He has received the Isaac Ray Award of the American Psychiatric Association for "outstanding contributions to forensic psychiatry and the psychiatric aspects of jurisprudence," was the Fritz Redlich Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and has been elected to the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. Dr. Appelbaum performs forensic evaluations in civil and criminal cases, and treats patients with a broad variety of problems, including depression, anxiety, and adjustment problems.
Dr. Appelbaum is involved in funded projects examining: functioning of IRBs at major medical centers around the country; therapeutic misconception in consent to research; assessment of decisional capacity of adolescent research subjects; the link between mental disorder and risk of firearm violence, and the effect of laws that limit access to guns for persons with mental illness; use of behavioral genetic data in the courts; informed consent to return of genomic data to research subjects; and the consequences of returning genomic data to research subjects. He leads a NHGRI-funded developing center for research on ethical, legal, and social implications of psychiatric, neurologic and behavioral genetics.
