Te-Jen Lai, MD, PhD
(Taiwan), Board of Directors

Dr. Te-Jen Lai was born in 1960, in Taichung city located in central Taiwan. He graduated from Kaohsiung Medical University, Kaohsiung Taiwan, in 1986. His psychiatric resident training was in National Cheng-Kung University hospital, Tainan Taiwan, where he worked for 7 years.

In 1995, he moved back to Taichung and established the new department of psychiatry in Chung Shan medical university hospital. Dr. Te-Jen Lai was promoted as professor in 2005 and director of institute of medicine since 2007.

Dr. Lai visited the department of geriatric psychiatry at Duke University Medical Center in the United States for one year from 1999 to 2000. There, he received geriatric psychiatry fellowship training and worked with Professor Ranga Krishnan in imaging study of geriatric depression, and with Jonathan Davidson in a PTSD study of the Chi-Chi earthquake in Taiwan. They published several papers on both topics.

After his return from Duke, Dr. Lai worked with Professor Jen-Ping Hwang and many colleagues in Taiwan to establish the Taiwanese Society of Geriatric Psychiatry (TSGP) in 2005. Currently, TSGP is the most active psychiatric society in Taiwan and one third of all psychiatrists in Taiwan are members of TSGP. Dr. Lai was elected president of TSGP in March 2011.

He is also teaching geriatric psychiatry to undergraduate and graduate students in medical school. Dr. Lai worked with his colleagues in his medical school to establish “National project for excellence in geriatric care education- A comprehensive, innovative and practical program for undergraduate and graduate students in Taiwan.” It is a very successful program for better education of geriatric medicine and gerontology. He works with his colleagues in neurology and psychiatry to run the memory clinic.

Dr. Lai also takes care of inpatients in the hospital’s geriatric psychiatric ward. The geriatric psychiatry program in his hospital is accredited to be a training center for geriatric medicine in Taiwan and will be accredited as a training center for geriatric psychiatry in Taiwan.

His study interests recently have been in the two fields of dementia. The first is working with his colleagues in basic science to investigate the interaction of microRNA and A-beta. The second is working with neurologists and psychiatrists in central Taiwan to run the cohort study of dementia.

Dr. Lai also belongs to some societies for anti-depression and suicide prevention in Asia and Taiwan. He worked with Professor Norman Sartorius to run the SEBoD (reduction of social and economic burden of depression in Asia) in Asia. As part of the chapter in Taiwan, Dr. Lai was involved in many educational programs (esp. de-stigmatization), press conferences and screening for depression in Taiwan.

Now Dr. Lai is the president of the Taiwan Association Against Depression (TAAD). He also established the alliance for anti-depression NGO in Taiwan. Currently, 12 associations or societies are part of this alliance and TAAD provides the platform for communication of members of this alliance, patients and caregivers.

In addition, Dr. Lai is also on the board of directors for the Taiwanese Society of Psychiatry, Taiwan Dementia Society, Dementia Care Association R.O.C and Taiwanese Society of Suicidology. He also established the “Taiwanese Duke Psychiatry Society (TDPS)’’to promote more mutual communication between psychiatrists in Taiwan and at Duke. Dr. Lai does his best to share the resources for education, collaborative studies and fellowship training with Duke. Around 20 Taiwanese psychiatrists have been trained at Duke and six psychiatrists from Duke have visited Taiwan.

He can be contacted at tejenlai@hotmail.com.

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