about the author

Mark Zimmerman, MD is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown University, the Director of Outpatient Psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital, and Principal Investigator of the Rhode Island Methods to Improve Diagnostic Assessment and Services (MIDAS) project. The MIDAS project has entered its second decade, and its primary goal has been to integrate research methodology into routine clinical practice in order to examine a number of issues related to diagnostic comorbidity and treatment outcome.

Dr. Zimmerman has conducted research in psychiatry for more than a two decades resulting in more than 240 publications in peer-reviewed journals, and an equal number of presentations at national meetings such as the Annual Meetings of the American Psychiatric Association and the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy. Much of Dr. Zimmerman's research has been in the area of assessment and diagnosis. While a research assistant at the University of Iowa, Dr. Zimmerman developed a self-report questionnaire to diagnose DSM-III major depressive disorder, and was one of the authors of the first semi-structured interview to assess the DSM-III personality disorders. Through his academic career he has continued his interest in scale development, and most recently he has developed the Psychiatric Diagnostic Screening Questionnaire (PDSQ), Diagnostic Inventory for Depression (DID), Rhode Island Gambling Outcome Rating Scale (RIGORS), the Clinically Useful Depression Outcome Scale (CUDOS), and the Clinically Useful Anxiety Outcome Scale (CUXOS). The CUDOS and CUXOS are the two scales used in the OutcomeTracker system. The MIDAS project recently began a program in the area of pre-surgical assessment of patients having bariatric weight loss surgery, and Dr. Zimmerman is working towards developing a screening measure to evaluate these individuals. He also is the author of the Interview Guide to Diagnose DSM-IV Psychiatric Disorders and the Mental Status Examination and a companion guide that is written for primary care providers. Dr. Zimmerman can be contacted at mzimmerman@lifespan.org.