Eva M. Szigethy, MD, PhD

Over the past 20 years, Szigethy has demonstrated clinical expertise, innovative research funded by national, foundations and institutional grants, a strong history of professional mentorship of multi-disciplinary teams, and the ability to solicit local and national philanthropic funds. As a practicing psychiatrist, her expertise developed around treating depression and anxiety with complex co-morbid medical-psychiatric conditions in adolescents and young adults. In her role as a clinical researcher with a doctorate in basic neuroscience and masters in translational clinical science, the past 15 years of her research career have focused on characterizing symptoms in patients with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and designing behavioral interventions to target neuropsychiatric manifestations of IBD. Specifically, her focus is how behavioral interventions can be used to target particular domains of depression and, once positive effects have been shown, how such interventions can be disseminated to clinicians in the field. Her interdisciplinary background, clinical research expertise, and ability to generate meaningful results have been recognized by being awarded the NIH Director’s Innovator Award (DP2 OD001210) and through the publication of over 75 peer-reviewed articles.Szigethy is experienced leading multi-center trials, as demonstrated by my National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) R-01 grant that used both variable and patient-centered approaches to characterize depression.

Throughout the years, she has established administrative leadership skills, starting with the completion of the Katz UPMC Physician Leadership Executive Business Program in 2016, to management of large grant budgets and programmatic budgets of her various integrated behavioral medical clinical programs. In addition, she received two national awards for her leadership in translational science - the Sherman Prize for Crohn’s and Colitis innovation and the Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Leadership Award in Consultation Liaison Psychiatry. Through her experience, she became an expert in translating research findings into clinical practice for screening patients with anxiety, depression, fatigue, sleep disturbance and pain.

Szigethy's recent work focuses on evidence - based integration of health technology in medical settings. She became a clinical innovator, setting up behavioral clinics embedded in gastroenterology, and most recently have been Co-Director of the first IBD subspecialty medical home at UPMC and in the United States. Their research and clinical team has shown that this model of care is not only feasible, but that it has a positive impact on clinical and health utilization outcomes. At UPMC, she is involved with vetting and scientifically testing behavioral health technology in real world settings.  They showed that a digital cognitive behavioral health therapy program was significantly more effective in improving clinical and medical utilization outcomes in primary care settings and outperformed behavioral monitoring alone in our IBD subspecialty medical home. To evaluate a high touch team versus health technology approach to patient care within gastroenterology medical homes, she was awarded a PCORI contract where, as Principal Investigator, she is leading a multi-site study with UPMC, Cleveland Clinic Foundation and Mount Sinai Medical Center.

As their IBD medical home is a project sponsored by the UPMC Health Plan, she learned the business of balancing clinical excellence with cost effectiveness.  She was appointed to a leadership role in the UPMC Health Services Division as Director of Behavioral Health within the Chief Medical and Scientific Office (CMSO) at UPMC, where she has focused on system-wide expansion of behavioral integration by incorporating innovation, data-driven care and health technology. By combining clinical research registries, UPMC electronic medical record informatics with the formation of multidisciplinary teams, her CMSO team has successfully expanded specialty medical homes with health technology integration across the system for both adolescents and adults. she has shown the ability to support the infrastructure of these programs by utilizing grant funds, philanthropic donations, shared savings plans within thier IDFS model at UPMC, and improving efficiency and scalability of behavioral care using digital behavioral solutions.

While performing her clinical, research and administrative responsibilities across the system, Szigethy continues to increase her role in mentoring junior staff and faculty to optimize their own research, clinical, and career goals.

Professional and Scientific Society Memberships

• American Psychiatric Association, 1993-Present
• American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 1997-Present
• Crohn’s and Colitis Foundation of America, 2002-Present
• American Society of Clinical Hypnosis, 2007-Present
• American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry, 2009-Present
• American Psychosomatic Society, 2012-Present
• American College of Gastroenterology Fellow Status, 2014-Present
• American Gastroenterology Association, 2015- Present
• Crohn’s and Colitis UK Steering Committee Member, 2019-Present