Eric J. Nestler

Dr. Eric J. Nestler is the Nash Family Professor and Chair of Neuroscience; Director of the Friedman Brain Institute; Professor of Phamacology and Systems Therapeutics; and Professor of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Nestler’s research endeavors to understand the ways in which the brain responds to repeated perturbations under normal and pathological conditions. The major focus of the research is drug addiction and depression: to identify molecular changes that drugs of abuse or stress produce in the brain to cause these disorders, and to characterize the genetic and environmental factors that determine individual differences in the ability of the drugs or stress to produce these changes. This work is based on the view that a greater knowledge of the neurobiological basis of addiction and depression will lead to more effective treatments and preventive measures. Dr. Nestler is the recipient of numerous awards and honors for this work, including the Pfizer Scholars Award, a Sloan Research Fellowship, a McKnight Scholar Award, the Jordi-Folch-Pi Memorial Award, the Efron Award, the Pasarow Foundation Award, the NARSAD Established Investigator Award, the Freedom to Discover Neuroscience Research Grant, the NARSAD Goldman-Rakic Award and Falcone Prize, the Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health, and the Anna Monika Prize in Depression Research. His publications appear in diverse journals including Cell, Nature, Neuron, PNAS, and Science.