Ronald C. Kessler, PhD

About:

Ronald C. Kessler is the McNeil Family Professor of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. His research deals broadly with the social determinants of mental illness from an epidemiological perspective. He is the author of over 1,000 publications and the recipient of many awards for his research, including Senior Scientist and MERIT awards from NIMH. He has been rated as the most widely cited researcher in the world in psychiatry for many years. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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., and of the World Mental Health Survey Initiative, a series of comparative community epidemiological surveys of the prevalence and correlates of mental disorders in 30 countries around the world. He is also the Harvard Medical School PI of the Army STARRS-LS program of 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. He is also involved in evaluating a number of innovative programs for the prevention and treatment of mental illness in high-risk segments of the population. Much of the latter 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, completed a postdoctoral fellowship in psychiatric epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin, and was on the faculty at the University of Michigan before taking his current position in 1994 at HMS.