Paula Panzer, MD

Expertise: Trauma, Organizational Change, Recovery-oriented Care, Confronting Structural Racism in Community Care

Paula G. Panzer, MD, Chief Clinical and Medical Officer at the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services in New York City, is a community psychiatrist with extensive clinical and administrative experience in the development and management of community practice models and trauma-based mental health services, including evidence-based practices and practice-based emerging-evidence models. Dr. Panzer provides leadership for the Clinical and Medical Services Division of this very large Health and Human Services Agency which collaboratively sets practice standards, structures and promotes continuous performance improvement, identifies and analyzes client outcomes, and supports discipline specific practice for Psychiatry, Nursing, Medicine and Psychology. Dr. Panzer provides oversight for the training and trauma departments which provide direct services to bereaved youth, kin-caregiving relatives and communities recovering from crises and disasters. Her division also includes the well-respected Martha K. Selig Educational Institute whose staff brings core competency training as well as cutting edge learning to both The Jewish Board staff and the larger community. Training is seen through the lens of practice improvement with a focus on bridging the worlds of health and behavioral health for the most welcoming, collaborative, respectful, effective and efficiently delivered care. Dr. Panzer holds an AB from Hamilton College, an MD from Cornell University Medical College and did her psychiatry training (as resident and chief resident) and public psychiatry fellowship at Columbia University in New York. She is currently a board member of the American Association of Community Psychiatrists, a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, and Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She is the lead author of Traumatic Stress in the Community, a chapter in the 2012 book Handbook of Community Psychiatry and proudly teaches in multiple settings about the necessity of integrating the impact of micro-aggressions and structural racism on people in to the crucial system and clinical lenses of Trauma Informed Care, Recovery Oriented Practice and Evidence Driven Practice.