Esme Shaller, PhD
Professor
Psychiatry
School of Medicine

My clinical activities are in the Department of Psychiatry, where I specialize in working with adolescents and young adults with chronic emotional dysregulation and histories of suicidality and self-harm. I am the Clinical Director of Outpatient Services for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, where I supervise faculty members, clinicians, and trainees across our programs. I am also the Director of the Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) program, a specialty program for high acuity patients and their families within our Mood and Anxiety Clinic.

RESEARCH INTERESTS: My primary duties at UCSF are clinical and educational, but I keep a toe in the research world by co-running a study on DBT for patients ages 13-25. We are examining not only the effectiveness of the clinical program at UCSF, but also the development of BPD traits across adolescence, the role DBT skills play in treatment outcome, and the differing ways in which young people experience urges and motivation to self-harm. I am also very interested in educational research, and am currently conducting a small study on the interfering role of misconceptions in learning new information.

EDUCATIONAL INTERESTS: My passion lies in the teaching and dissemination of empirically supported treatments for complex psychological problems, particularly in adolescence. I teach and supervise a wide variety of trainees in the Department of Psychiatry, including psychology interns and post-docs, psychiatry residents, and child and adolescent psychiatry fellows. I develop curricula for didactics across these training programs as well as consult and teach in community and county programs across the Bay Area to help implement evidence-based psychotherapies. I am especially interested in the gap between research and practice in psychotherapy and enjoy collaborating with my research faculty colleagues on ways to improve evidence-based behavioral treatments for mental disorders.