Overview

Gender

male

Brent P. Forester, MD, MSc, is the chief of the Division of Geriatric Psychiatry at McLean Hospital, medical director for Behavioral Health and Evaluation & Research at Partners Population Health and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Forester is an expert in geriatric psychiatry, specializing in the treatment of older adults with depression, bipolar disorder, and behavioral complications of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias. He is currently President-Elect of the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry.

Forester graduated from Dartmouth Medical School, completed an internship in Internal Medicine at the Massachusetts General Hospital, a Residency in Psychiatry at McLean Hospital and a fellowship in geriatric psychiatry at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center. He returned to McLean Hospital in 2002 as the medical director of the Cognitive Neuropsychiatry Unit.

At Mclean Hospital, Forester currently leads two NIA-funded R01 multi-center clinical trial R01 grants to study novel treatment approaches, including dronabinol and electroconvulsive therapy, to manage behavioral complications of dementia such as agitation and aggression.

In his role as medical director for Behavioral Health at Partners Population Health, Forester works with multidisciplinary teams of healthcare professionals to integrate psychiatric assessment and treatment into primary care settings, with a focus on depression, anxiety and substance use disorders. He is currently leading a healthcare system-wide Memory Care Initiative at Partners Health Care to bring a collaborative care model for dementia assessment and treatment into the primary care setting.

Forester has published numerous articles and book chapters on topics including Geriatric Bipolar Disorder, the Behavioral and Psychological Symptoms of Dementia and Late Life Depression. He also served a co-editor of Bipolar Disorder in Older Age Patients, published by Springer in 2017.