Amin completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Rochester, medical school at the Medical College of Virginia, and psychiatry residency at the University of California, San Francisco Department of Psychiatry. He then enrolled in a two-year research fellowship in psychiatric genetics, before discovering that his true passion was in medical education. Deciding that 27 years of formal education just wasn’t enough, he went back to school for a masters’ degree in education, at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on quantitative methods and evaluation.

Amin Azzam is a professor at 3 San Francisco bay area universities: 1) University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine, 2) University of California, Berkeley School of Public Health, and 3) Samuel Merritt University. He has dedicated his career to innovations in health professional schools, including Problem Based Learning (PBL), Simulation Based Learning (SBL), and Open Educational Pedagogy (OEP). He remains clinically active—running long-term psychotherapy groups for patients with chronic illnesses. He lives in Oakland with his wife (June) and children (Remy and Margo). They enjoy camping, board games, and international travel.

Clinically he specializes in group psychotherapy for patients with chronic medical conditions.

His research interests include exploring the efficacy of various instructional approaches in stimulating health-professional students’ acquisition, retention, and application of content knowledge in their evolving roles as clinicians.