Michael Ostacher

Dr. Ostacher is Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences. He is the Site Director for the Addiction Medicine Fellowship at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System, where he also serves as the Medical Director of the Pharmacology of Addiction Recovery Clinic, the Director of the Bipolar and Depression Research Program and the Co-Director of the VA/Stanford Exploratory Therapeutics Lab, the Director of Advanced Fellowship Training in Mental Illness Research and Treatment for MDs for the VISN 21 MIRECC, and the Site Director at the VA Palo Alto for Advanced Fellowship Training for Stanford. A graduate of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, the Harvard School of Public Health, and Harvard Medical School, he completed his training at The Cambridge Health Alliance at Harvard Medical School in Adult Psychiatry, Public Psychiatry, and Geriatric Psychiatry, and is currently board certified in Psychiatry, Addiction Psychiatry, and Addiction Medicine. He is the Digital Content Editor for the journal Evidence-Based Mental Health and is on the editorial boards of Bipolar Disorders, the International Journal of Bipolar Disorders, the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, Current Psychiatry, and Psychiatric Annals. His current research includes roles as Site Investigator for VA-BRAVE, multicenter, randomized trial comparing long-acting injectable buprenorphine to sublingual buprenorphine/naloxone, and trials of psychedelic drugs in psychiatric disorders in Veterans. With funding from NIDA, he studied, along with Jaimee Heffner, Ph.D. at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, smoking cessation in people with bipolar disorder using a novel online psychotherapy derived from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. His primary research interest is in large clinical trials mental health and addiction, and the implementation of evidence-based mental health practices.