Amin Azzam, MD
Professor
Psychiatry
School of Medicine

Deciding that 27 years of formal education just wasn’t enough, he went back to school for a masters’ degree in education, at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on quantitative methods and evaluation.

Amin Azzam is a professor at 3 San Francisco bay area universities: 1) University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, 2) University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, and 3) Samuel Merritt University. He has dedicated his career to innovations in health professional schools, including Problem Based Learning (PBL), Simulation Based Learning (SBL), and Open Educational Pedagogy (OEP). He remains clinically active—running long-term psychotherapy groups for patients with chronic illnesses. He lives in Oakland with his wife (June) and children (Remy and Margo). They enjoy camping, board games, and international travel.

Clinically he specializes in group psychotherapy for patients with chronic medical conditions.

His research interests include exploring the efficacy of various instructional approaches in stimulating health-professional students’ acquisition, retention, and application of content knowledge in their evolving roles as clinicians.

• Developing faculty leadership from 'within': a 12-year reflection from an internal faculty leadership development program of an academic health sciences center.
  Medical education online 2019 Tsoh JY, Kuo AK, Barr JW, Whitcanack L, Merry I, Alldredge BK, Azzam AN
• Wikipedia Editing Courses at Three US Medical Schools in the 2017-2018 Academic Year.
  MedEdPublish 2019 Mihir Joshi, Rafael Verduzco, Sara Yogi, Maite Garcia, Sanskriti Saxena, Sean Tackett, Nadine Dexter, Angela Dempsey, Evans Whitaker, Amin Azzam
• Pharmacy students can improve access to quality medicines information by editing Wikipedia articles.
  BMC medical education 2018 Apollonio DE, Broyde K, Azzam A, De Guia M, Heilman J, Brock T
• The reCAPTCHA of medical education.
  Medical teacher 2018 Tackett S, Gaglani S, Heilman J, Azzam A
• Academics anonymous: A medical student's 12-step guide to scholarly productivity.
  Education for health (Abingdon, England) 2017 Wei N, Bourgeois JA, Hategan A, Azzam A
• Embracing Wikipedia as a teaching and learning tool benefits health professional schools and the populations they serve
  Innovations in Global Health Professions Education 2017
• Embracing Wikipedia as a teaching and learning tool benefits health professional schools and the populations they serve.
  Innovations in Global Health Professions Education 2017 Amin Azzam
• Why Medical Schools Should Embrace Wikipedia: Final-Year Medical Student Contributions to Wikipedia Articles for Academic Credit at One School.
  Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges 2017 Azzam A, Bresler D, Leon A, Maggio L, Whitaker E, Heilman J, Orlowitz J, Swisher V, Rasberry L, Otoide K, Trotter F, Ross W, McCue JD
• The Health Professions Education Pathway: Preparing Students, Residents, and Fellows to Become Future Educators.
  Teaching and learning in medicine 2016 Chen HC, Wamsley MA, Azzam A, Julian K, Irby DM, O'Sullivan PS
• From Industry to Generativity: The First 12 Years of the Association for Academic Psychiatry Master Educator Program.
  Academic psychiatry : the journal of the American Association of Directors of Psychiatric Residency Training and the Association for Academic Psychiatry 2016 Blitzstein SM, Seritan AL, Sockalingam S, Randall M, Kablinger A, Lieff S, Azzam A
• Evaluation of the Program in Medical Education for the Urban Underserved (PRIME-US) at the UC Berkeley-UCSF Joint Medical Program (JMP): The First 4 Years.
  Teaching and learning in medicine 2015 Sokal-Gutierrez K, Ivey SL, Garcia RM, Azzam A
• Genome-wide linkage analysis of obsessive-compulsive disorder implicates chromosome 1p36.
  Biological psychiatry 2012 Mathews CA, Badner JA, Andresen JM, Sheppard B, Himle JA, Grant JE, Williams KA, Chavira DA, Azzam A, Schwartz M, Reus VI, Kim SW, Cook EH, Hanna GL
• ADHD prevalence and association with hoarding behaviors in childhood-onset OCD.
  Depression and anxiety 2010 Sheppard B, Chavira D, Azzam A, Grados MA, Umaña P, Garrido H, Mathews CA
• Student near-peer co-tutors in PBL groups.
  Medical education 2009 Martinez W, Azzam A, Mack K
• Evidence for a heritable unidimensional symptom factor underlying obsessionality.
  American journal of medical genetics. Part B, Neuropsychiatric genetics : the official publication of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics 2008 Mathews CA, Greenwood T, Wessel J, Azzam A, Garrido H, Chavira DA, Chandavarkar U, Bagnarello M, Stein M, Schork NJ
• A comparative study of obsessive-compulsive disorder in Costa Rica and the United States.
  Depression and anxiety 2008 Chavira DA, Garrido H, Bagnarello M, Azzam A, Reus VI, Mathews CA
• Heritability and clinical features of multigenerational families with obsessive-compulsive disorder and hoarding.
  American journal of medical genetics. Part B, Neuropsychiatric genetics : the official publication of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics 2007 Mathews CA, Nievergelt CM, Azzam A, Garrido H, Chavira DA, Wessel J, Bagnarello M, Reus VI, Schork NJ
• Anxiety symptoms and perceived performance in medical students.
  Depression and anxiety 2007 Chandavarkar U, Azzam A, Mathews CA
• Meta-analysis of the association between the catecholamine-O-methyl-transferase gene and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
  American journal of medical genetics. Part B, Neuropsychiatric genetics : the official publication of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics 2003 Azzam A, Mathews CA