Ronald C. Kessler, PhD

Bio

Ronald C. Kessler, PhD, is the McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Kessler’s research deals broadly with the social determinants of mental health and illness as studied from an epidemiological perspective. He is the author of over 1,000 publications and the recipient of many awards for his research, including the Senior Scientist and MERIT Awards from the National Institute of Mental Health. He has been rated as the most widely cited researcher in the world in the field of psychiatry for many years. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Dr. Kessler is the principal investigator of the US National Comorbidity Survey, the first nationally representative survey of the prevalence and correlates of mental disorders in the U.S., a number of NCS replications, and the  World Mental Health Survey Initiative, a series of comparative community epidemiological surveys of the prevalence and correlates of mental disorders and treatment for these disorders in 30 countries around the world. Dr. Kessler is also the principal investigator of the Harvard Medical School site for Army STARRS-LS, a program of epidemiological and neurobiological research on risk and protective factors for suicide among Army personnel and the AURORA study of adverse neuropsychiatric reactions to traumatic life events among patients presenting to emergency departments in the wake of such events. In addition to his epidemiological studies, Kessler is involved in evaluating several innovative programs for the prevention and treatment of mental illness in high-risk segments of the population.  Much of his work involves collaboration with the Precision Treatment of Mental Disorders (PTMD) initiative to develop and implement precision treatment models to determine the right interventions for the right patients.

Kessler earned his PhD in sociology from New York University in 1975. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin before joining the faculty at the University of Michigan in 1979. He was a professor of sociology and a program director at Michigan’s Institute for Social Research at the time he took his current position at Harvard Medical School in 1994.

A full description of Dr. Kessler's research can be found on his Harvard Scholar website.

CV

Curriculum Vitae