Speaker Biographies
November 7, 2005

Charles C. Engel is Assistant Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University and the Director of the Department of Defense Deployment Health Clinical Center at Walter Reed in Washington, DC. Dr. Engel is a respected psychiatric epidemiologist and health services researcher, evaluating health system strategies for mitigating the chronic health effects of war, terrorist attacks, and natural or man-made disasters. Notably, Dr. Engel has served as a principal investigator on three major multi-center clinical trials testing the impact of various healthcare improvements for military and Veterans Affairs health care beneficiaries.

B. Christopher Frueh is a Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Division of Public Psychiatry at the Medical University of South Carolina. He also serves as the Director of the PTSD Clinical Team at the Charleston Veterans Affairs Medical Center. He has obtained eight federally funded research grants as Principal Investigator, including a K-series award titled Mental Health Service Delivery to Trauma Victims, and two R01s from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Department of Defense, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. He has over 100 scientific publications, is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Traumatic Stress, and is on the editorial boards of three other journals.

Sally Satel is a resident scholar at AEI and the staff psychiatrist at the Oasis Clinic in Washington, D.C. She serves on the advisory committee of the Center for Mental Health Services of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Dr. Satel earned a B.S. from Cornell University, an M.S. from the University of Chicago, and an M.D. from Brown University. After completing her residency at Yale University School of Medicine, Dr. Satel was an assistant professor of psychiatry from 1988 to 1993. From 1993 to 1994 she was a policy fellow with the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee. She has written widely in academic journals on topics in psychiatry and medicine and has published articles on cultural aspects of medicine and science in numerous magazines and journals. Dr. Satel is author of Drug Treatment: The Case for Coercion (AEI Press, 1999), PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting Medicine (Basic Books, 2001), and coauthor, with Christina Hoff Sommers, of One Nation Under Therapy (St. Martin’s Press, 2005).

Simon Wessely is Professor of Epidemiological and Liaison Psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, and Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at King’s and Maudsley Hospitals. Currently his primary research is on various aspects of military health, including the so-called "Gulf War Syndrome," psychological stressors of military life, risk and risk communication, risk and benefits of military service, screening and health surveillance within the Armed Forces, social and psychological outcomes of ex-service personnel, and historical aspects of military psychiatry. He is also in progress of conducting a study on the health of 20,000 UK military personnel who took part in the invasion of Iraq.