Kathleen A. Crapanzano, MD, has been named the first George Bishop Professorship of Public Psychiatry at LSU Health New Orleans. The position, named for renown psychiatric pioneer George A. Bishop, the professorship is for a faculty member working in the Baton Rouge area with low income and marginalized populations.
Crapanzano, a respected clinician and educator, has been a faculty member with the Department of Psychiatry since 2011 and currently serves as an associate professor of clinical psychiatry and director of the psychiatric residency at Our Lady of the Lake-Baton Rouge. She has authored 20 publications in peer-refereed journals since 2013. Her area of research interest is the effects of stigma towards people with mental illness and addictive disorders.
She received her undergraduate degree from Louisiana State University and her medical degree from LSU Health New Orleans. She served an internship and residency in psychiatry at the Medical College of Georgia. She worked with and served patients being cared for in the public sector at the Eastern Louisiana Mental Health System, and served as medical director of the Louisiana Department of Health and Hospitals, Office of Mental Health, from 2006-08.
Crapanzano served as president of the Louisiana Psychiatric Medical Association and is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. She received a master’s degree in academic medicine from the University of Southern California Keck School of Medicine.
“I am honored and humbled to receive this award. Dr. Bishop’s dedication to his work and his patients was an example for all of us to follow, and I hope my continued work will be an appropriate furtherance of his legacy,” Crapanzano said. “The generosity of the Bishop family will allow research and advocacy to continue to grow in Baton Rouge along with our educational mission here at the LSU Health Sciences Baton Rouge campus.”
The family of Dr. Bishop established an endowed fund in his honor to recognize his commitment to and legacy in public psychiatry. Bishop was responsible for the development of programs to aid the underserved, low income and marginalized patients throughout the state.
Bishop earned his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Notre Dame and his medical degree from The Medical College of Wisconsin. He completed his internship at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville, Tenn., and his residency in psychiatry at Tulane University Medical School. During the 1960s and 1970s, Bishop pioneered modern treatments for the mentally ill at East Louisiana State Department of Psychiatry in Jackson.