Clinical and Academic Position
Dr. Sultan is a practicing child and adolescent psychiatrist and researcher at Columbia University Irving Medical Center and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital. He holds an appointment as Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry in the Columbia University Department of Psychiatry, one of the world's leading psychiatric research and training programs.
He directs the Sultan Lab for Mental Health Informatics at the New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI), which applies computational and informatics methods to psychiatric research, clinical decision-making, and mental health outcomes.
Research and Publications
Dr. Sultan's 2019 study in JAMA Network Open — examining antipsychotic prescribing patterns in youth with ADHD — has accumulated 440+ citations and influenced national clinical practice guidelines. He has published in JAMA Psychiatry on telehealth oversight and AI integration in mental health care, and holds NIH NIDA K12 funding for ongoing research on cannabis and adolescent mental health outcomes.
Selected publications:
- Sultan RS, et al. National Patterns of Antipsychotic Medication Treatment for Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, 2004–2016. JAMA Network Open. 2019. [440+ citations]
- Sultan RS, et al. Telehealth and Unregulated Digital Psychiatry Platforms. JAMA Psychiatry. 2022.
- Sultan RS. Hallucination vs. Confabulation: Rethinking AI Error Terminology. integrative-psych.org. 2024.
Why AI Psychiatry
In July 2025, Jack Lindsey at Anthropic announced the formation of an "AI psychiatry" team — a group dedicated to mechanistically understanding AI behavioral phenomena. The name reflected a genuine intellectual convergence: interpretability research had independently recapitulated the structure of psychiatric science.
Dr. Sultan is uniquely positioned at this intersection. He is a practicing clinician who spends his days characterizing behavioral patterns, mapping them to mechanisms, and designing interventions — applied to human patients. He is also a published researcher on AI in psychiatry, having written on telehealth oversight and AI clinical decision-making, trained in natural language processing under Carol Friedman (creator of MedLEE, the foundational biomedical NLP system), and referred to Anthropic's model psychiatry team directly by Jack Lindsey and Christopher Olah.
The field he is developing — AI psychiatry — is not AI ethics or AI safety advocacy. It is a scientific methodology: applying the accumulated clinical knowledge of psychiatry to a new substrate that presents the same fundamental epistemological challenge as mental illness.
Credentials
- Board Certification: Adult Psychiatry (American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology)
- Board Certification: Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (ABPN)
- Faculty Appointment: Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University Irving Medical Center
- NIH Funding: NIDA K12 Award — $670,000+ in federal research funding
- Training: Residency and Fellowship, New York State Psychiatric Institute / Columbia University
- Medical Degree: MD, Drexel University College of Medicine
Media and Commentary
Dr. Sultan has been featured on PIX11, quoted in national media on ADHD and cannabis policy, and writes on digital psychiatry, AI in mental health, and the intersection of clinical medicine and AI behavioral science. He serves as a discussant on AI in mental health at the Columbia Data Science Institute.
Contact and Collaboration
Dr. Sultan is interested in collaboration with AI interpretability researchers, clinical psychiatrists engaging with AI systems, and journalists covering the intersection of mental health and technology. He can be reached through ryansultan.com.
For media inquiries related to AI psychiatry, ADHD, or cannabis research, contact the Sultan Lab at Columbia University.