Keith Semler, DO

Keith Semler, DO, sees the brain as medicine’s final frontier. “We know a lot, but there’s so much we don’t know,” he says. “Understanding the brain is how we’ll advance psychiatry, beyond just developing new medications,” he says.
A biochemistry graduate of Stockton University, Galloway, he earned his medical degree at Rowan University School of Osteopathic Medicine, Stratford. He completed one year of internal medicine training before completing his psychiatry residency training at AtlantiCare. He served as an adjunct professor at Stockton University and earned AtlantiCare’s Medical Student Teaching Award. For a year, he was a National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative Scholar, focusing on neuroscience-based psychiatric education.
He specializes in interventional psychiatry. “We help people who aren’t getting better, despite their healthcare team’s best efforts. We can often make progress with a more aggressive strategy,” he explains. That could include transcranial magnetic stimulation, electroconvulsive therapy or esketamine nasal spray. “Seeing patients improve after being at their wits’ end is really gratifying. I’m excited for the opportunity to be a part of these programs at AtlantiCare and give the medical community a place to turn when traditional therapy isn’t working,” he says. Dr. Semler says psychiatry was always on his radar. “I learned so much in internal medicine but my original passion kept calling. I followed my heart,” he says.
A similar life change brought him to medicine. He started as an engineering student, attracted to the idea of designing and building things. “But I learned that most of an engineer’s day is spent behind a computer crunching numbers. It wasn’t for me,” he says. He received some sound advice from his father. “He said, ‘You’re 23 years old, you can do anything you want.’ In medicine, I’m not behind a desk and I see different challenges every day,” he says.