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Kerry J. Ressler, MD, PhD, is Chief Scientific Officer and James and Patricia Poitras Chair in Psychiatry at McLean Hospital, after serving at Emory University for 18 years. He is also a professor in psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and president-elect for the Society for Biological Psychiatry. Dr. Ressler was previously an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine).

Dr. Ressler’s lab focuses on translational research bridging molecular neurobiology in animal models with human genetic research on emotion, particularly fear and anxiety disorders. He has published over 225 manuscripts ranging from basic molecular mechanisms of fear processing to understanding how emotion is encoded in a region of the brain called the amygdala, in both animal models and human patients.