ERIC NESTLER MD PHD

Founding Member, BSAB, Director of the Friedman Brain Institute, The Mount Sinai Hospital, N.Y. Dr. Nestler is the Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience, Chairman of the Department of Neuroscience, and Director of the Brain Institute at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. He received his B.A., Ph.D., and M.D. degrees from Yale University, and completed his residency training in psychiatry at McLean Hospital and Yale in 1987. He then served on the Yale faculty from 1987-2000 where he was the Director of the Division of Molecular Psychiatry, and was Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas from 2000 to 2008, before moving to Mount Sinai.

Dr. Nestler has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, on the National Advisory Mental Health Council for the National Institute of Mental Health, and as Council member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and of the Society for Neuroscience. He is a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression and of the International Mental Health Research Organization, and a member of the Board of Directors of the McKnight Endowment Fund in Neuroscience. He currently serves on the National Advisory Drug Abuse Council for the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Dr. Nestler was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 1998 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

The goal of Dr. Nestler’s research is to better understand the molecular mechanisms of addiction and depression. His research uses animal models of these disorders to identify the ways in which drugs of abuse or stress change the brain to lead to addiction- or depression-like syndromes, and to use this information to develop improved treatments of these disorders.