Scientific Advisory Board

Millard Brown III, MD is an experienced Informatics-trained, board-certified adult and child Psychiatrist with a demonstrated history of working in the military healthcare industry. Skilled in Behavioral Healthcare measurement-based care, Healthcare Leadership at the hospital and health-system levels, and quality improvement development. He has a proven ability to develop system concepts into actionable plans to deliver high quality, value-based behavioral health care.

Dr. Carl Castro is currently Professor and Director of the Military and Veteran Programs at the Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work at the University of Southern California.  Before joining the University of Southern California, Professor Castro served in the U.S. Army for over 30 years, beginning his career as an enlisted infantryman and retiring at the rank of colonel.  Dr. Castro has chaired numerous NATO and international research groups and he is currently Co-Chair of a NATO group exploring military and veteran violent radicalization.

Dr. Eachempati works for Point72 Asset Management as an Analyst in Healthcare specializing in Therapeutics. Prior to this position, he was a Professor of Surgery at the Weill Cornell Medical Center where he practiced for 20 years in the field of Trauma, Critical Care, and Emergency Surgery. At Cornell, he also held positions as Chief of Trauma Services and Chief of the Surgical Intensive Care Unit. He is also an expert in Disaster Management and participated in emergency disaster relief in Haiti after the 2010 Earthquake there.

Shelley M. MacDermid Wadsworth is a Distinguished Professor of Human Development and Family Science at Purdue University, where she directs the Center for Families, as well as the Military Family Research Institute, which she co-founded.  Dr. MacDermid Wadsworth holds an M.B.A. in Management and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Human Development and Family Studies from The Pennsylvania State University.  Her primary research interest is the relationship between work conditions and family life, with special focus on military families.  She is an author of over 140 articles and chapters.  Her research has been supported by the National Institutes of Health; the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs, and Agriculture; state governments; and numerous private philanthropies.  Dr. MacDermid Wadsworth is a recipient of the Work Life Legacy Award from the Families and Work Institute and a fellow of the National Council on Family Relations, from which she also received the Felix Berardo Scholarship Award for Mentoring (2018) and the Burgess Award for continuous and meritorious contributions to theory and research in the family field (2022).  She has served on federal advisory committees for the National Academies of Science and the Department of Defense, and has testified in Congress on multiple occasions regarding military and veteran families. In 2016, Purdue University received the Kellogg Award from the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities and the Higher Education Civic Engagement Award from the Washington Center in recognition of the work of the Military Family Research Institute.  Dr. MacDermid Wadsworth is a recipient of the Morrill Award, Purdue University’s highest faculty honor, for outstanding career achievements that have had an impact on society, and has been named a “Top Ten Extraordinary Contributor” among work-family researchers worldwide. 

Rajeev Ramchand, PhD is an epidemiologist who studies the prevalence, prevention, and treatment of substance use and mental health disorders. His research has focused on suicide prevention, behavioral health treatment, behavioral health epidemiology, military and veteran health, disasters and community resilience, and crime and justice. He has additional expertise in program evaluation and has co-authored two, freely available workbooks and additional tools to promote evaluation within community-based organizations. He has authored over 100 peer-reviewed publications and his research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Justice, Department of Defense, Department of Veterans Affairs, and private foundations. His commentary has been published in various media outlets and he has testified twice before the United States Congress and also before the California State Senate.

Dr. Ramchand received his B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago and Ph.D. in psychiatric epidemiology from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He then worked for 12 years as a behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation where he received two RAND Gold Medal Awards for his research on suicide prevention and one Presidential Award, RAND’s highest honor, for his work on military and veteran caregivers. Next, he served as Senior Vice President for Research at the Cohen Veterans Network where he helped establish the organization’s research agenda and laid the foundation for conducting research within the network. He then became the inaugural Craig Newmark Fellow at the Bob Woodruff Foundation before returning to RAND in July 2020.

In addition to the CVN Scientific Advisory Board, Dr. Ramchand also serves on the Board of Directors of Bastion Community of Resilience in New Orleans, LA and the School Life and Mission Committee of Canisius High School in Buffalo, NY; the Assessment and Intervention Standards Committee of the American Association of Suicidology; the Steering Committee of the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline; the National Response to COVID-19 Steering Committee of the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention: and the National Consortium for Preventing Law Enforcement Suicide.

Paula Schnurr is the Executive Director of the National Center for Post-traumatic stress disorder in the Office of Mental Health and Suicide Prevention in the Department of Veterans Affairs. She helped found the Center in 1989 and previously served as Deputy Executive Director. She is a Professor of Psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth and Editor of the Clinician’s Trauma Update-Online. She is a former Editor of the Journal of Traumatic Stress, Past-President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, and a fellow of the American Psychological Association. With over 300 publications, she has won several awards for her research and contributions to the field of traumatic stress studies. Her research focuses on the treatment of PTSD and on the longitudinal effects of traumatic exposure on physical and mental health. She earned her BA from the State University of New York In Buffalo, her PhD from Dartmouth College and completed a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Dartmouth Medical School.