Arbor Scientia Group was founded in 2005 by two individuals from very different backgrounds. Mr. Rick Davis is a seasoned business consultant and international authority on communication and adult learning. Dr. Stephen M. Stahl is an internationally renowned psychopharmacologist, and one of Cambridge University Press’s bestselling and most prolific authors. The goal was to change the way medical education was done in the world to improve patient outcomes.
The co-founders’ vision was to incorporate communication science and adult learning principles in ways that would accelerate healthcare professionals’ learning, making up-to-date medical information and best practices more accessible. Our co-founders developed their medical education methods and published their research on its implementation in a Cambridge University Press book, Best Practices in Medical Teaching. We have refined our methods for over two decades and brought superior medical education to audiences in over 70 countries and trained many of today’s most sought-after medical presenters.
Arbor Scientia Group continues to be recognized for its innovative educational formats and award-winning results and has grown to contain three sister companies—Arbor Scientia, Metis Medical Media, and Sirona Medical Education—all headquartered in Carlsbad, California.
Our companies support medical education for a wide variety of disease states, including neurology, psychiatry, hematology, oncology, rare diseases, immunology, virology, cardiovascular, women’s health, urology, diabetes, and gastroenterology. Our staff, located across the United States, features PhD-trained scientists with a wide variety of expertise, communication experts, creatives, and client services teams.
Promotional medical education produced for over 70 countries.
Our Founders
Richard (Rick) Davis
President and CEO of Arbor Scientia Group
Rick Davis is an adult learning and communications expert who wanted to bring the most effective learning techniques from other industries and apply them to medical education. As a sought-after master speaker, author, moderator, and consultant, his lectures, courses, and coaching sessions have taken him to dozens of countries on 5 continents to speak to thousands of healthcare professionals. He has coauthored numerous articles in medical literature on many educational topics, including outcomes analyses, speaker presentation skills, audience psychology, and best practices for presenting medical information.
Mr. Davis has been a featured speaker on the topic of instructional design at the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP) Biennial meeting, and his educational programs have been cited by the San Diego Branch of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) for excellence in medical education, and by the CINP for post-graduate education in neurology and psychiatry. He is also a highly sought-after executive coach, providing dozens of speakers, top executives, and healthcare professionals in multiple therapeutic areas with personal executive coaching on presentation skills.
Stephen M. Stahl, MD, PhD, DSc (Hon)
Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego
Honorary Visiting Senior Fellow, University of Cambridge, UK
Editor-in-Chief, CNS Spectrums
Director of Psychopharmacology Services and Senior Academic Advisor, California Department of State Hospitals
Dr. Stephen M. Stahl, MD, PhD, DSc (Hon), is internationally known for his dynamic and engaging lectures that make even the most complex topics easy to understand and remember. Throughout his career, the passion has been to make medical information accessible and easy to learn. This principle is carried through in his 39 books on psychopharmacology, and the more than 500 scientific publications he has authored.
Dr. Stahl’s desire to make medical education both fun and effective has resulted in numerous awards, including the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP) Lundbeck Foundation Award in Education for his contributions to postgraduate education in psychiatry and neurology. His books have won the British Medical Association’s Book of the Year Award, and recently, first prize for best digital medical book. Dr. Stahl is also the winner of the A.E. Bennett Award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, the APA/San Diego Psychiatric Society Education Award, and the UCSD Psychiatry Residency Teaching Award, and has been cited as both one of “America’s Top Psychiatrists” and one of the “Best Doctors in America.” He was honored with the Distinguished Psychiatrist Award of the AAPA and gave the Distinguished Psychiatrist Lecturer for 2013. He was named the 2016 David Mrazek Award Winner of the American Psychiatric Association and gave the Mrazek Pharmacogenomics Memorial Lecture at the 2016 APA meeting. His alma mater, Northwestern University, honored him by naming the award for the most promising medical student to pursue psychiatry the “Stephen M. Stahl Award.” In 2018, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science by Üsküdar University in Istanbul, Turkey for his lifetime of achievements in psychiatry.
