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LEADERSHIP Summers Names Former HMS Professor to Be New ProvostHarvard president Lawrence Summers announced in late October the appointment of Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, as the University's new provost. Hyman will assume his new position on Dec. 10.
Former HMS professor of psychiatry Steven Hyman has been tapped as the University's new provost. He has spent the last six years as director of the National Institute of Mental Health. "Steve Hyman is an outstanding scientist, an admired educator, and a creative organizational leader," Summers said in his announcement. As the senior University-wide academic officer after Summers, Hyman will be responsible for academic planning and policy matters of high priority to the University, with an emphasis on activities that extend across several Harvard faculties or otherwise involve collaboration and change. Hyman is no stranger to Harvard. Prior to his appointment as NIMH director, he spent 20 years at HMS, both as a student and faculty member. He graduated in 1980 and did his internship at Massachusetts General Hospital and residency at McLean Hospital. He was then a clinical and research fellow in endocrinology and neurology at MGH and spent four years as a postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology. As a faculty member, Hyman rose to the rank of professor of psychiatry. He served as deputy director of psychiatry research at Massachusetts General Hospital from 1992 to 1996 and director of the Division on Addictions at HMS from 1992 to 1995. From 1994 to 1996, Hyman became the first faculty director of the University's interfaculty Mind/Brain/Behavior initiative. The program brought together scholars from across Harvard to pursue fundamental questions about human behavior along novel interdisciplinary lines, extending across neuroscience, the social sciences, and humanities. Then in 1996, Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health, tapped Hyman to lead the NIMH. As its director, he intensified efforts to bring together molecular biology, genetics, neuroscience, and behavioral science in an integrated way to better understand mental illness and mental health. Hyman also reorganized the institute's peer review systems, its extramural funding divisions, and its intramural research programs. Hyman's own research is on mechanisms of neural plasticity in the brain. His principal focus has been on how dopamine and glutamate produce long-term changes in brain function by altering gene expression in the striatum and nucleus accumbens, regions involved in the control of motivated behavior and implicated in the action of both antipsychotic medications and drugs of abuse. "I am very excited to be returning to Harvard and to have the opportunity to address important issues ranging from new ways of crossing disciplinary bounds to thinking about science education for undergraduates," Hyman said. "For the life sciences, this is a time of unprecedented opportunity. I look forward to helping the Medical and Dental Schools, the School of Public Health, and the Faculty of Arts and Sciences capitalize on these opportunities to advance knowledge and, as a result, to make substantial improvements in public health." |
