May 20, 2024 — As a young girl growing up in Eustis, Florida, Carolyn Drazinic, M.D. ’98, Ph.D. ’96, B.S. ’90, M.B.A., dreamed of being a concert pianist. Her skilled hands brought each note to life, from classics to jazz to rock ’n’ roll. Little did she know, her hands would one day lead the future of psychiatric care in Florida, helping patients through the opioid crisis, veteran mental health services, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

“The biggest surprise of my medical career was that I went into psychiatry,” Drazinic said.

This triple Gator was inspired to pursue a career in medicine by her father, the first OB-GYN in Eustis and a beloved pillar of the community, who delivered over 3,000 babies at Florida Waterman Hospital, now AdventHealth Waterman. She entered UF’s combined B.S./M.D. program, then called the Junior Honors Medical Program, in 1989. She also loved basic science, particularly genetic engineering, which led her to join the College of Medicine’s MD-PhD Training Program to study molecular genetics and microbiology in yeast models under the direction of former department chair Henry V. Baker, Ph.D.

“That was the most amazing training I could have had,” Drazinic said. “Yeast was the best model . . . and the lab smelled great, too, like baking bread. I learned all kinds of things that helped me later in life and in my career.”

After completing her Ph.D. and moving into clinical rotations, Drazinic found herself in love with psychiatry by the end of her first clerkship week.

“People were saying, ‘Oh, you wasted your Ph.D.; do you really want to do this?’ and I said, ‘Yes, psychiatry and the brain is the new frontier for molecular genetics.’ The possibility of combining the two was amazing and miraculous to me.”

Drazinic used her UF training to hold simultaneous patient care and research practices in residency and fellowships at Yale University, where she explored the behavioral phenotypes of genetic syndromes, like Velocardiofacial syndrome, and the genetics of aggression in forensic psychiatry. Outside of work, Drazinic continued her creative and musical pursuits and was one of the founders of the Yale Argentine Tango Club.

As faculty at the University of Connecticut, she served as director of the Huntington’s Disease Program, studying the pathogenesis of the trinucleotide repeat illness in the lab in evenings after seeing patients in clinic during the day.

When a family emergency struck, Drazinic had to shift gears and suddenly return home to Florida. She took a position as chief medical officer of psychiatry for Jackson Health System in Miami, and founded Miami-Dade’s county’s first public Suboxone clinic to help patients with opioid addiction. In 2018, when the opportunity came to lead the State of Florida’s nine psychiatric hospitals, she moved to Tallahassee and became chief medical officer of substance abuse and mental health in the Florida Department of Children and Families. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.

Drazinic recalls sitting in a small UF class  as a student, listening to Professor Emeritus Sue Anne Moyer, Ph.D., explain the biology of coronaviruses, saying they are common cold viruses. Thanks to her genetics and medical background, Drazinic understood what her colleagues and patients would face with the pandemic. In the spring of 2020, she began to give one-hour seminars twice a week about the latest information about the COVID-19 virus, local community infection rates, how N-95 masks work better than other masks, how to implement infection containment on hospital wards, and much more, so leaders at each state psychiatric hospital could do what was necessary to protect their patients, staff, and communities from spreading COVID-19 infections.

“That coronavirus lecture and my M.D.-Ph.D. training had such a huge impact on me, since I was in charge of Florida’s state psychiatric hospitals through the pandemic,” she said. “We were able to save a lot of lives.”