Spotlight on Dr. Jaswant Guzder and Dr. Jens Pruessner

In this edition of Spotlight, we would like to congratulate Dr. Jaswant Guzder and Dr. Jens Pruessner for their promotion to the rank of Full Professor.

Dr. Jaswant Guzder

Dr. Guzder was trained as a psychoanalyst .  In addition to being a part of McGill Department of Psychiatry, she is also an associate to McGill Faculty of Social Work, and supervisor for the Art Therapy Masters program at Concordia University.  Furthermore, Dr. Guzder serves as the head of Child Psychiatry and Director of Childhood Disorders Day Hospital at the Jewish General Hospital, and is also a senior consultant for the Jewish General Hospital Cultural Consultation Service.

Dr. Guzder has published on a wide variety of issues related to mental health in refugee, immigrant and child and adolescent populations.  She is involved in collaborations in transcultural psychiatry projects, currently with South Asian and Caribbean populations.

Dr. Jens Pruessner

Dr. Pruessner completed his graduate studies at Trier University in Germany in Psychoendocrinology and psychoneuroendocrinology, and continued onto his postgraduate studies at Mcgill University specializing in neuroimaging techniques at Montreal Neurological Institute and Douglas Mental Health University Institute.  Dr. Pruessner teaches courses in the Departments of Psychology, Psychiatry and Neurology & Neurosurgery.

He specializes in aging, psychoneuroendocrinology, and neuroimaging, and his research mainly focuses on studying stress perception and processing.  In his work, he and his team have developed several tasks including the mental arithmetic task for stress induction named Montreal Imaging Stress Task (MIST), and the Trier Mental Challenge Test employed when investigating the effects of stress on brain activations.

*The “Spotlight” is an on-going departmental news capsule which spotlights a member of our faculty, their involvements and accomplishments. Should you wish to nominate someone for the series, please submit to Communications.psychiatry [at] mcgill.ca ().