Rate My Professor Eric Nestler

Eric J. Nestler, MD, PhD, is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Executive Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer of the Mount Sinai Health System. He holds the Nash Family Professorship of Neuroscience and is Professor of Psychiatry and Pharmacological Sciences. Nestler earned his BA, PhD in pharmacology, and MD from Yale University, completing his psychiatry residency at Yale and McLean Hospital in 1987, followed by postdoctoral fellowships in clinical pharmacology and psychiatry at Yale. From 1987 to 2000, he served as Professor of Psychiatry, Pharmacology, and Neurobiology at Yale, where he founded the Division of Molecular Psychiatry. In 2000, he became the Lou and Ellen McGinley Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, a position he held until 2008. That year, Nestler joined the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai as Chair of the Department of Neuroscience, a role he maintained until 2016. He was the inaugural Director of The Friedman Brain Institute from 2008 to 2025, Dean for Academic Affairs from 2016 to 2025, and Chief Scientific Officer from 2021 onward. Under his leadership, the Institute became a leading center for neuroscience research, securing substantial National Institutes of Health funding and fostering multidisciplinary teams.

Nestler's research elucidates the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying drug addiction and depression, focusing on drug- and stress-induced changes in gene expression, chromatin structure, and brain reward circuitry. Key discoveries include the role of the transcription factor ΔFOSB and epigenetic mechanisms in rewiring the brain, advancing treatments that account for sex differences and stress resilience. He has authored over 800 publications, cited more than 173,000 times with an h-index of 209, including seminal works such as 'Neurobiology of Depression' (2002), 'The Molecular Neurobiology of Depression' (2008), and 'A Molecular and Cellular Theory of Depression' (1997). Nestler co-authored definitive textbooks: Charney and Nestler’s Neurobiology of Mental Illness (sixth edition) and Nestler, Hyman, and Malenka’s Molecular Neuropharmacology (fourth edition). His contributions earned election to the National Academy of Sciences (2025), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2005), and National Academy of Medicine (1998), along with the Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize, Julius Axelrod Prize for Mentorship, Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic Prize, Falcone Prize, and Gold Medal from the Society of Biological Psychiatry.