Practice Leader
Specialty Clinical Services
Joan Busner, PhD, has 25 years’ experience as an academic clinical psychiatric researcher, having held medical school psychiatry department faculty appointments since 1985. Currently, she is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Penn State College of Medicine.
Dr. Busner served as the Principal Investigator (PI) for 49 industry-sponsored psychiatric clinical trials and Sub-Investigator (Sub-I) for 35 additional clinical trials. As PI, her areas of clinical trials focus have included inpatient and outpatient pediatric and adult studies of depression, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social phobia, PTSD, obsessive compulsive disorder, ADHD and schizophrenia. As Sub-I, she has focused on clinical trials in nursing homes, as well as inpatient and outpatient studies of Alzheimer's Disease and agitation associated with dementia.
For the 20 years prior to joining UBC, Dr. Busner served continuously on academic Institutional Review Boards (IRBs). Most recently, she was Vice Chair of the IRB of Penn State College of Medicine. She also held the position of Division Director for the Psychiatric Clinical Trials Unit of Penn State Hershey Medical Center, a unit she created. Before that, she was Director of the Saint Louis University Division of Psychiatric Clinical Trials.
Dr. Busner lectures frequently on ethics in psychiatric research, the placebo effect in psychiatric research, the role of IRBs, clinical trials methodology and the objective assessment of psychopathology. An active contributor to psychiatric literature, she has published on the pharmacotherapy of ADHD, clinical trials methodology, clinical global impressions in clinical trials, anxiety disorders in adults and at-risk offspring and pediatric psychopharmacology.
Dr. Busner received her PhD in Experimental Social Psychology and her MA in General Psychology from Adelphi University.