Dr. Andrei Novac is Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California at Irvine, School of Medicine, and Founding Director of the Traumatic Stress Program. He is also a clinical associate at the New Center for Psychoanalysis (NCP) in Los Angeles. He graduated from the Carol Davila School of Medicine in his native Bucharest, Romania in 1978. After a post-MD three year internship in Pediatrics, he immigrated to the US and completed his internship and psychiatric residency at UC Irvine in 1986. He has written and published on man-made traumatic stress and its impact on brain biology, depressive disorders and their subtypes, Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in families of Holocaust survivors, Cognitive Bias and youth violence, resiliency and the brain/mind functional unit. He is the author of articles, research studies, commentaries, book reviews, two behavioral rating scales and has lectured at numerous national and international conferences. Dr. Novac is a board-certified psychiatrist and a Distinguished Fellow of the APA. He is the past chair of the Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma Special Study Group at the International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS). More recently, Dr Novac has been interested in the study of functional neuroanatomy and the cortical-subcortical circuits in human attachment and brain plasticity (dissection workshops and courses with the late Lennart Heimer, MD). He has investigated clinically the brain response to subliminal visual stimuli by means of fMRI. Other current projects of investigation include “paratraumatic behaviors”, referring to survival behavior; transprocessing, the mechanism of neurobiological processing during psychotherapy; and identity narrative (IdN), a component of autobiographical memory. In 2004 he was granted the award “Top Psychiatrists in America” by the Consumer Research Counsel of America in Washington, DC. Since 2015, he has been listed under “Best Doctors” in Orange Coast Magazine from Castle Connolly Top Doctors.
Recent Publications
Novac, A., Tuttle, M., Blinder, B. (2019). Identity Narrative and its role in biological survival: Implications for child and adolescent psychotherapy. J Infant Child Adolesc Psychother (in press). link
Novac A (2019 Ed.). “Mood Disorders: Depression, Bipolar Disease and Mood Dysregulation.” In: Rick Kellerman; David Rakel (Eds.): Conn’s Current Therapy, pp. 768-777. Elsevier/Saunders, Philadelphia PA. link
Nguyen, C., Novac, A., Hazen, J., Howard, P., Tieu, R. & Bota, R.G. (2018). Weight gain changes in patients with aripiprazole monotherapy compared with aripiprazole-antidepressant polypharmacy in an outpatient sample. J Psychopharmacol. 32(4):423-429. link
Novac A, Cheng Tuttle M, Bota R, Brown Yau J, & Blinder BJ (2017). Identity and Autobiographical Narratives: Towards an integrated concept of personal history in psychiatry. Mental Health Fam Med, 13:625-636. link
Novac A, Bota RG, & Blinder B (2017). Identity narrative density: Preliminary findings from scoring emotional valence of autobiographic events. Bull of the Meninger Clin, 81(4):299-313. link
Novac A (2015). “Attachment, Neurobiology, and Military Sexual Trauma.” In: Katz, L Treating Military Sexual Trauma, pp. 43-60. Springer Publishing: New York. link
Novac, A., McEwan, S. Bota, R. (2014). Negative rumor: Contagion of a psychiatric department. The Primary Care Companion for CNS Disorders (Physicians Postgraduate Press, Inc.), 16(2). link
Brewin, CR; Lanius, RA; Novac, A; Schnyder, U; Galea, S. “Reformulation PTSD for DSM-V: Life After Criterion A.” J Traumatic Stress. 2009; 22:336-373. link