Gregory B. Saathoff, M.D.
Gregory B. Saathoff M.D. is Associate Professor of Research in Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, and Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at the University of Virginia’s School of Medicine. He also serves as Executive Director of the University of Virginia’s Critical Incident Analysis Group (CIAG). In this capacity, he directs the operation of the group, which operates as a “ThinkNet” that provides multidisciplinary expertise in developing strategies that can prevent or mitigate the effects of critical incidents. To that end, he has organized annual conferences relating to critical incidents and the Constitution, the terrorist threat abroad, the protection of symbols of democracy, the threat of bioterrorism, the relationship of domestic intelligence collection to terrorism, the sniper event in the National Capital Region, and hostage taking in Iraq.
In 1996 he was appointed to a Commission charged with developing a methodology to enable the FBI to better access non-governmental expertise during times of crisis. In that regard, Dr. Saathoff has since 1996 served as the Conflict Resolution Specialist to the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group. In this role, he consults with the Crisis Negotiation Unit and the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. He serves as an adjunct faculty member at GWU and is a Senior Fellow in their Homeland Security Policy Institute. In 2003, he served as a Visiting Professor at James Madison University. Over the past fifteen years, he has consulted to three prisons in the Virginia Department of Corrections, treating male and female violent and nonviolent offenders who suffer from mental illness.
During the Gulf War, Dr. Saathoff was called from reserve duty and deployed as a medical corps psychiatrist overseas, earning the Army Commendation Medal in 1991. Dr. Saathoff retired from the Army Reserves with the rank of Major. A member of the University of Virginia’s Kuwait Project, he studied societal trauma in Kuwait subsequent to the Iraqi occupation. Dr. Saathoff has served on the faculty of the Saudi-U.S. Universities Project located at the King Faisal Specialist Hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. In addition to the Middle East, his work has taken him to projects in the former Soviet Union, Western Europe, and Australia.
He has been asked to meet with senior Dutch officials at the Hague regarding psychosocial aspects of threat of those under security protection. He was privileged to assemble and lead a University of Virginia medical team as the U.S. component of the international medical group charged with diagnosis and treatment of the poisoning of President Viktor Yuschenko in 2004. In 2005, he served as an expert witness for the U.S. Government in Federal Court, in its prosecution of Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, for his role in an Al-Quaeda conspiracy to assassinate President Bush. Oak Ridge Associated Universities has named Dr. Saathoff to expert panels in behavioral science and infrastructure.
From 2000-2005 he served as the Chair of the Committee on International Relations for the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry. He has written The Negotiator’s Guide to Psychotropic Drugs for the FBI’s Crisis Negotiation Unit, and he was a co-author of the FBI’s threat assessment monograph: The School Shooter. In addition to this, he has published in the areas of the personality disorders, police psychiatry, post-traumatic stress disorders, public response to weapons of mass destruction, and biologic psychiatry. He is currently co-authoring a book on clinical forensic poisoning with UVa Chief of Toxicology, Christopher Holstege, M.D. In March of 2006, he was appointed to the Research Advisory Board of the FBI’s National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. Dr. Saathoff is married and has three children who are all currently in college. He resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.