Eric J. Nestler

Eric J. Nestler serves as a board director for BERG. He is the Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience, Director of the Friedman Brain Institute, and Dean for Academic and Scientific Affairs at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. His work in neuropsychopharmacology has been instrumental in forming a molecular approach to psychiatry and has furthered the understanding of the molecular basis of both depression and drug addiction, using animal models to study the way drug use or stress affects the brain. Dr. Nestler is the author of Neurobiology of Mental Illness and Molecular Neuropharmacology, and more than 600 chapters and peer-reviewed publications. He is active in six research projects funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Institute of Mental Health.

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 on the National Advisory Drug Abuse Council for the National Institute on Drug Abuse. He also served as Council Member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (for which he served as president in 2011) and of the Society for Neuroscience (for which he served as president in 2017). He chairs the Scientific Advisory Board of One Mind, is a member of the Scientific Council of Brain and Behavior Research Foundation, and is a past member of the Board of Directors of the McKnight Endowment Fund in Neuroscience.

Dr. Nestler was elected to the Institute of Medicine (now National Academy of Medicine) in 1998 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005. Dr. Nestler’s awards and honors include the Pfizer Scholars Award (1987), the Sloan Research Fellowship (1987), the McKnight Scholar Award (1989), the Efron Award of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (1994), the Pasarow Foundation Award for Neuropsychiatric Research (1998), the Bristol-Myers Squibb Freedom to Discover Neuroscience Research Grant (2004), the Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic Award and the Falcone Prize both from NARSAD (2008, 2009), the Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health from the Institute of Medicine (2010), the Wilbur Cross Distinguished Alumnus Medal from the Yale University School of Graduate Studies (2017), and the Redelsheimer Distinguished Award from the Society of Biological Psychiatry (2019).

He received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in Sweden in 2011. He has consulted for several pharmaceutical and biotech companies. He is a co-founder and SAB chair for PsychoGenics, Inc. Dr. Nestler received his B.A., his Ph.D. and his M.D. from Yale University. He completed his residency in psychiatry at both McLean Hospital in Massachusetts and Yale in 1987, then served as the Director of the Division of Molecular Psychiatry at Yale until 2000. He later served as Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. In 2008, he joined the staff at Mount Sinai.