Kerry J. Ressler, MD, PhD

McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School

Dr. Kerry Ressler is the Chief Scientific Officer at McLean Hospital and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He is an international leader in understanding the biology of fear and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and he is a member of the National Academy of Medicine, a prior HHMI Investigator, past president of the Society of Biological Psychiatry and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. He is author of more than 600 manuscripts, with over 75,000 citations, focused on the molecular, cellular, and circuitry neuroscience of fear, focused primarily on amygdala function, as well as the human psychobiology of stress and trauma, with more recent work examining the interaction of stress, trauma, and addiction. He has served on the Board of Scientific Counselors for NIMH, the Scientific Advisory Board of the National Center for PTSD, and the Army STARRS project, as well as multiple academic and pharma/biotech programs. In addition to his own preclinical and clinical labs, he is a co-leader of multiple national consortia, such as the Psychiatric Genomics Consortia for PTSD and the AURORA study, for deep phenotyping and understanding biomarkers and the genetic architecture of PTSD and stress-related disorders.