Teaching

Teaching and talks

Silvia A. Bernardi, M.D. · Psychiatrist & Neuroscientist · New York & Milan · Updated October 2026

Dr. Bernardi has practiced psychiatry for more than twenty years, and teaching clinicians is part of that practice. Two traditions meet in her teaching: psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and measurement-based psychiatry grounded in neuroscience.

Transference-Focused Psychotherapy

Dr. Bernardi is on the faculty of the two-year Transference-Focused Psychotherapy training program at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, where she teaches the first-year seminar. She is also a member of TFP New York, the network of TFP clinicians in New York.

Certified in TFP at Columbia and trained in the tradition of Otto Kernberg, she teaches and supervises TFP for clinicians working with personality disorders: setting the treatment contract, working in the transference, managing crises without abandoning the frame, and integrating psychotherapy with thoughtful prescribing.

Her writing for the International Society of Transference-Focused Psychotherapy includes:

Measurement-based psychiatry

She also teaches how to read a patient's treatment history as data, how to use wearable sleep data and objective cognitive testing in everyday practice, and how to prescribe — and de-prescribe — one variable at a time. She has also contributed teaching chapters to the DSM-5 Casebook, Gabbard's Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders and The Addiction Casebook.

At Columbia she taught Introduction to Neuroscience to psychiatry residents and Cases in General Psychiatry to medical students, and supervised residents in outpatient psychiatry.

Recent talks

A Conversation on Bipolar Disorder Care — Ember Health, New York, October 14, 2026. Evening panel on advancing bipolar disorder treatment, with psychologist Dr. Stephanie Freitag; facilitated by Dr. Nico Grundmann, Medical Director and co-founder of Ember Health.

Research, lectures and public outreach

Dr. Bernardi's scientific work spans twenty-four peer-reviewed articles — from Cell and PNAS to Psychological Medicine and The British Journal of Psychiatry — five book chapters, and more than a dozen peer-reviewed presentations. It has been supported by the Burroughs Wellcome Fund Career Award for Medical Scientists, a National Institutes of Health K08 career development award as principal investigator, a Brain & Behavior Research Foundation Young Investigator Grant, the Leon Levy Fellowship in Neuroscience, an American Psychiatric Association research fellowship and a research grant from the Columbia Psychoanalytic Center, as well as NIH research-training grants.

She has presented her research at the Society for Neuroscience, the Society of Biological Psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association, the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology — where her work on treatment-resistant OCD was selected as a hot-topic presentation — the World Psychiatric Association and the European Psychiatric Congress. Earlier in her career she lectured widely in Italy on adult ADHD, impulsivity, internet addiction and borderline personality disorder, including at the Italian Society of Psychopathology and for the Italian Medicines Agency.

Beyond the academy, she has served as a television news correspondent on mental health and violence for RAI 1, Italy's national broadcaster, and delivered a hundred hours of school education on gambling and behavioral addictions in New York, sponsored by the State Office of Addiction Services.

Neuroscience for the Mind

Dr. Bernardi founded Neuroscience for the Mind, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to clinical research and education in the biology of mental illness. Its founding focus is the peripartum period — the hormonal and stress biology of pregnancy and the postpartum months — with the aim of testing biological distinctions that diagnostic categories built on symptoms alone have not examined. Its longer-term goal is a research institute. Education for clinicians and the public is part of its mission.

Invitations

Dr. Bernardi speaks to clinical teams, training programs and organizations in English and Italian.

Questions

Where can clinicians learn Transference-Focused Psychotherapy?
TFP is taught through specialized training programs and supervision by clinicians trained in the Kernberg tradition. Dr. Silvia Bernardi is on the faculty of the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research TFP program and teaches and supervises TFP in New York and Milan.

What is measurement-based psychiatry?
An approach in which treatment decisions are guided by systematic measurement — symptom scales, objective cognitive testing, sleep and physiological data, and structured review of medication history — rather than by impression alone.