Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD

Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

Dr. Eric J. Nestler is the Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, where he serves as Dean for Academic and Scientific Affairs and Director of the Friedman Brain Institute. He received his B.A., Ph.D., and M.D. degrees, and psychiatry residency training, from Yale University. He served on the Yale faculty from 1987–2000, where he was the Elizabeth Mears and House Jameson Professor of Psychiatry, Pharmacology, and Neurobiology, and Director of the Division of Molecular Psychiatry. He moved to Dallas in 2000, where he was the Lou and Ellen McGinley Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, until moving to New York in 2008.

Dr. Nestler is a member of National Academy of Medicine (1998) and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005). He is a past President of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (2011) and the Society for Neuroscience (2017). He is a founder and scientific advisory board chair for PsychoGenics, and a member of the Board of Directors of Berg Pharma. The author of more than 600 publications and five books, the goal of Dr. Nestler's research is to better understand the molecular basis of drug 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.