Who We Are
Navy CAPT Edward Simmer, M.D., M.P.H.
Senior Executive Director, Psychological Health
Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury (DCoE)
Navy CAPT Edward Simmer currently serves as the senior executive director for psychological health at DCoE.
Simmer previously served for three years as the director for quality management at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth. In this role he had primary responsibility for improving the quality of care and customer service at the Navy’s largest medical center. Prior to his appointment as a director, he was the psychiatry department head at Portsmouth, where he significantly increased patient access, allowing the department to open services to all TRICARE Prime beneficiaries for the first time.
His prior assignments included being the general medical officer on the USS Enterprise (CVN-65) and the division psychiatrist for the Second Marine Division at Camp Lejeune, N.C. At Second Marine Division he developed the Division’s first critical incident stress response team.
Simmer has deployed to Iraq as an individual augmentee with the Army’s 113th Combat Stress Control Company, Camp Taji Detachment. In this role he was a member of a six-person team responsible for providing mental health support to the 20,000 soldiers at Camp Taji. He has also served as the Head of Mental Health for Joint Task Force-160 at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
From 1999-2008, Simmer served as the head of the Navy Medicine East, Special Psychiatric Rapid Intervention Team (SPRINT), a Navy mental health disaster response team. He led numerous responses to traumatic incidents, including shipboard deaths, aircraft mishaps, and the USS Cole (DDG-67) bombing. He worked with medical personnel returning from Operation Iraqi Freedom / Operation Enduring Freedom deployments. He was also responsible for the stress control mission with the guard staff at Guantanamo Bay from January-June 2002, and led the SPRINT responses in the aftermath of Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina.
He has written journal articles and coauthored a book chapter on disaster mental health. In addition, he has given many presentations on post-traumatic stress, disaster psychiatry, and the impact of deployments on service members and their families.
Simmer received his Bachelor of Arts from Hiram College, his Medical Degree from the Saint Louis University School of Medicine and his Master of Public Health from the Eastern Virginia Medical School/Old Dominion University Consortium. He completed his psychiatry residency at Naval Medical Center Portsmouth and is board certified in general and forensic psychiatry. Simmer is also active in graduate medical education, and is the Navy specialty leader for interns.