Professor Steven E. Hyman, MD, is Director of the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. He is also Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology. Hyman was one of the key architects of the Broad Institute, when it was launched in 2004 as a bold experiment in biomedicine and became a permanent institution in 2009.
Hyman joined the Broad after a decade of service as provost of Harvard University. As provost he served as Harvard’s chief academic officer, and also had a special focus on the development of collaborative scientific initiatives that span multiple disciplines and cross-institutional boundaries.
From 1996 to 2001, he served as director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). At NIMH he emphasized investment in neuroscience and emerging genetic technologies that might address the complexity of neuropsychiatric disorders, and also initiated a series of large clinical trials including a focus on children, a population about which little was known with certainty.
Prior to his government service he was the first faculty director of Harvard University's interdisciplinary Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative. In the laboratory he studied the control of neural gene expression by neurotransmitters, especially dopamine, with the goal of understanding mechanisms that regulate emotion and motivation in health and illness.
Hyman is the editor of the Annual Review of Neuroscience and the founding president of the International Neuroethics Society. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academies of Science where he serves on the Council, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, and a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He has received numerous awards, including recognition for public service from the U.S. government and from patient advocacy groups including the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.