Director of UC San Diego's CARE Early Psychosis Program since founding it in 1999, Kristin Cadenhead, MD serves as Professor of Psychiatry at the UCSD School of Medicine and sees patients at the Dickinson Street psychiatry suite in Hillcrest. Her clinic identifies and treats adolescents and young adults at clinical high risk for schizophrenia spectrum disorders, working alongside the broader outpatient team at UC San Diego Health Psychiatry – Hillcrest. As a principal investigator within the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study (NAPLS) consortium, she runs research protocols on biomarkers, cognitive testing and family-focused therapy that feed directly into how prodromal symptoms get managed in clinic. Cadenhead also served as UCSD's Psychiatry Residency Program Director from 2017 to 2022, training the early-career physicians who now staff the affiliated inpatient psychiatry unit at Hillcrest Medical Center at UC San Diego Health. The most complex cases coordinate CBD trial protocols, family-focused therapy and antipsychotic medication management for first-episode psychosis patients still completing high school or starting college.