Steven Hyman, M.D.

From early 1996 to December 2001, Dr. Steven E. Hyman was the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the component of the National Institutes of Health charged with generating the knowledge needed to understand, treat and prevent mental illness. Under Dr. Hyman's leadership, NIMH has heightened the priority it gives to four broad areas: (1) fundamental research on brain, behavior and genetics; (2) rapid translation of basic discoveries into research on mental disorders; (3) research that directly impacts the treatment of individuals with mental disorders, including clinical trials and studies of treatment and preventive interventions in "real world" settings; and (4) research on child development and childhood mental disorders. Dr. Hyman continues to direct an active research program in molecular neurobiology on the NIH campus (Bethesda, MD) focused on how neurotransmitters, especially dopamine and glutamate, alter the expression of genes in the striatum and thereby produce long-term changes in neural function that can influence behavior.

Prior to his position at NIMH, Dr. Hyman was Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Director of Psychiatry Research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. He also taught neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and was the first faculty Director of Harvard University's Interfaculty Initiative in Mind, Brain and Behavior. In addition to his scientific writings, Dr. Hyman has authored and edited several widely used clinical texts. He serves on several review and advisory boards including the Riken Brain Sciences Institute in Japan, the Max Planck Institute in Germany and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in the United States. Dr. Hyman received his B.A. from Yale in 1974 (summa cum laude) and his M.A. from the University of Cambridge in 1976, where he was a Mellon fellow studying the history and philosophy of science. He received his M.D. from Harvard Medical School (cum laude) in 1980. Following an internship in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a residency in psychiatry at McLean Hospital and a clinical fellowship in neurology at MGH, he was postdoctoral fellow at Harvard in molecular biology.