Kathleen Askland, MD, MA, Research Scientist

Dr. Askland, a Research Scientist at Waypoint and Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at both the University of Toronto and McMaster University. Dr. Askland graduated from the Medical College of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia) in 1996. She completed her internship at the Harvard Longwood Psychiatry Residency Training Program in Boston, MA and her residency training at Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Hanover, New Hampshire. She also completed a Master’s degree in Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley and received formal training in epidemiology through the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), Epidemic Intelligence Service, part of the US Public Health Service. Prior to relocating to Penetanguishene to take her current position at Waypoint, she was academic faculty at Butler Hospital, the psychiatric and training hospital of Brown University in Providence, RI. There, she served as an attending psychiatrist in the psychiatric emergency assessment program for 8 years, where she cared for patients in crisis and supervised many medical students and residents in training.  She was also an active member of the faculty teaching staff, providing didactic education to psychiatric residents. In her last five years at Brown, she was funded through an NIH Career Development Award to support advanced training and experience in biostatistics, statistical programming and machine learning.

Dr. Askland has many years of clinical experience in treating the full gamut of psychiatric illness in both acute and outpatient settings. Areas of clinical expertise include the treatment of treatment-resistant mood disorders and the identification and management of Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) and other sleep disorders, specifically as they relate to chronic and severe mental illnesses. Through collaboration with regional sleep labs, respiratory technicians and CPAP vendors, she and her colleagues are working to streamline rapid diagnosis and treatment of obstructive sleep apnea in her outpatient clinic at Waypoint, and have developed a behavioural approach to address the problem of CPAP non-adherence. She currently splits her professional time between outpatient psychiatric practice and research. Her current research projects are focused on: 1) the development of statistical/machine learning methods to advance our understanding of the genetics of psychiatric illness and 2) understanding the role of OSA in mental illness.