Who We Are

Army Col. Charles Engel, M.P.H., M.D.

Director,
Deployment Health Clinical Center

Army Col. Charles Engel has served as the director for the Deployment Health Clinical Center (DHCC) for the past 13 years. He is an accomplished psychiatric epidemiologist and health services researcher. Col. Engel has extensive experience in the academic field and has been instrumental in joint Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Department of Defense (DoD) efforts to develop and implement guidelines for depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, post-deployment health evaluation and medically unexplained physical symptoms.

Col. Engel’s research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, National Institute of Aging, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, DoD, and VA. He leads the large-scale primary care clinic implementation and evaluation initiative for RESPECT-Mil (Re-Engineering Systems of Primary Care Treatment in the Military) for post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. RESPECT-Mil has touched nearly 200,000 primary care visits in 46 military primary care clinics worldwide during its 18-month lifespan.

Col. Engel is an active duty Officer in the U.S. Army with 27 years of service. He has often served as a DoD advisor on post-war physical and mental health. He is also assistant chair (research) and associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences (USUHS). He has authored or coauthored over 100 published articles and 175 scholarly abstracts. His work has addressed topics such as mental health in primary care, medically unexplained symptoms, persistent post-war physical symptoms, post-traumatic stress disorder, clinical trial methods, clinical practice guideline development and implementation, and environmental risk communication.

Col. Engel is a highly regarded medical educator, having received the 2005 American Psychiatric Association’s Nancy C.A. Roeske Award for Excellence in Medical Student Education and the 2003 Association of Military Surgeons of the United States William Porter Award for Outstanding Contributions in Psychiatry.

He directs an innovative Disaster & Preventive Psychiatry Fellowship that was one of the first of its kind worldwide. This USUHS research and mental health policy fellowship awards an M.P.H. degree and provides excellent public health research training.

Col. Engel is devoted to improving the research literacy of mental health professionals, and for the past thirteen years he has taught a unique clinical epidemiology and critical research appraisal course for clinical psychiatrists.