Our Residents
Residents at their annual retreat in Sonoma, California.
Current Resident Spotlight
Anneke Post, MD 
I was born in the Netherlands, raised in Pennsylvania and Texas, and found myself in California for undergraduate work at Stanford. Texas claimed me again for medical school at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, but San Francisco tends to have a strong pull, and hopefully I’m here to stay this time. My three years at CPMC have been very special for me, both in terms of professional and personal growth. I had a hunch when I interviewed here that a small residency program would be a better fit for me, and when I arrived I knew that I had made the right choice. The program is personal, but the training is first-class. The emphasis here is on producing well-rounded psychiatrists with advanced knowledge of psychopharmacology, but what’s unique is the psychotherapy training. In my spare time I like to explore my San Francisco neighborhood, the Mission, ride my bike, watch movies, see bands I like, or get out of town for the weekend up to Sonoma county or eastward for snowboarding in the winter.
Maryam Eskandari, MD
Throughout my education, I’ve always been interested in human experience and meaning. In college at UC Berkeley, I majored in neurobiology and minored in German and in philosophy. I became interested in the overlap between psychiatry, existential philosophy and phenomenology, so I decided to pursue a dual degree in medicine & philosophy. I attended Columbia University for medical school, and did two years of graduate work in philosophy at UC Irvine, where my focus was existential philosophy. When learning about my options for residency, CPMC definitely stood out as a special program & the place where I felt most at home. The CPMC psychiatry residency program emphasizes training in psychodynamic psychiatry, which I think is crucial for a well-rounded education in psychiatry. CPMC provides a warm, supportive and healthy atmosphere for learning, which I find rare and invaluable. Our residency director is very open and receptive to our thoughts and feedback, which is probably the most important ingredient for a happy and healthy residency program. That CPMC is situated in San Francisco is the icing on the cake. I think of CPMC as a hidden secret that I'm so thankful I found.
Sweta Shah, MD
It is no surprise to anyone who knows me that I chose a career in psychiatry. Although I have been formally studying mental health since majoring in psychology as an undergraduate at UC Berkeley, I have been curious about human behavior and thought processes ever since I can remember. After college, initially envisioning a career in clinical psychology, I spent two years working as a domestic violence counselor. However, my increasing interest in the interaction of the biological basis of mental illness led me to instead pursue a degree in medicine at the University of California, Davis. Between my third and fourth years of medical school, I had the opportunity to study borderline personality disorder in adolescents through the Doris Duke Clinical Research Fellowship at the Mount Sinai Mood and Personality Lab in New York. As a fourth year medical student, I discovered I had many “requirements” for my ideal residency training program – overall proficiency, strong psychotherapy training, solid psychopharmacology courses, diversity of patients and instructors, supportive faculty and co-residents, and perhaps most importantly, an environment that would continue to foster the natural curiosity that drew me to this field in the first place, no matter how many long hours I worked. CPMC is that program.
Residency Awards and Post Graduate Experience
Graduates of the California Pacific Medical Center Psychiatry Residency Training Program tend to remain in the San Francisco Bay Area. Approximately 25% of the program's graduates enter child/adolescent residencies and fellowship programs; 25% join medical groups; 10% join community psychiatry programs; and 35% enter solo private practices in psychiatry. Many graduates remain involved with the Department in clinical and teaching roles as attending psychiatrists, and as supervisors and instructors for residents and medical students.
Recent graduates of the program have been accepted for subspecialty training fellowships in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Geriatric Psychiatry. Residents in training in the Department have received fellowship awards including the American Association of Directors of Psychiatry Residency Training International Medical Graduate Fellowship, the Group for Advancement of Psychiatry Ginsberg Fellowship, and the American Psychoanalytic Association Fellowship Award, the APA Minority Fellowship and CORF Fellowship.