Eric J. Nestler
Eric J. Nestler is an American neuroscientist and academic psychiatrist whose work focuses on the molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying drug addiction, depression, and stress-related psychiatric disorders. He is the Anne and Joel Ehrenkranz Dean of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and Chief Scientific Officer the Mount Sinai Health System. He was formerly the Nash Family Professor of Neuroscience and a founding director of The Friedman Brain Institute at Mount Sinai. Previously, he served as founding director of the Division of Molecular Psychiatry at Yale University and Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
Nestler is known for elucidating how transcriptional and epigenetic mechanisms—including the transcription factor ΔFosB—produce long-lasting changes in brain reward and stress circuits that contribute to addiction, depression, and stress resilience. He has authored or co-authored several widely used textbooks in psychiatry and neuroscience, such as Neurobiology of Mental Illness and Molecular Neuropharmacology, and more than 700 peer-reviewed articles. He has also held leadership roles in major professional societies, including serving as president of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and the Society for Neuroscience, and has been elected to the National Academy of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences for his contributions to neuropsychiatric research.
Biography
Education
Nestler is a graduate of Herricks High School in New Hyde Park, New York. He received his B.A., his Ph.D. and his M.D. from Yale University, where he performed his doctoral research in the laboratory of Paul Greengard. He completed his residency in psychiatry at both McLean Hospital in Massachusetts and Yale in 1987.Career
Nestler served as Director of the Abraham Ribicoff Research Facilities, and as the Founding Director of the Division of Molecular Psychiatry, at Yale until 2000, and as Chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas. He joined Mount Sinai in 2008 as Chair of Neuroscience and Founding Director of The Friedman Brain Institute, which he and his colleagues built into one of the foremost neuroscience institutes in the world. In 2016, Nestler was named Dean for Academic and Scientific Affairs and was named Interim Dean in 2025. He has served on the Boards of Scientific Counselors of the National Institute on Drug Abuse and of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, on the National Advisory Mental Health Council for the National Institute of Mental Health, the National Advisory Drug Abuse Council for the National Institute on Drug Abuse, as Council Member of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and the Society for Neuroscience. He chairs the Depression Task Force of the Hope for Depression Research Foundation, co-chairs the Scientific Advisory Board of , is a scientific council member of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, and a past member of the Board of Directors of the McKnight Endowment Fund in Neuroscience. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine in 1998, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2025.Research
The Nestler laboratory's focus in neuropsychopharmacology and molecular neuroscience concentrates on forming a molecular approach to psychiatry and furthering the understanding of the molecular basis of both depression and drug addiction, using animal models to study the way drug use or stress affects the brain. His addiction research largely centers around several transcription factors, including ΔFosB and CREB and the associated epigenetic remodeling that occurs in specific neuronal or glial cell types in the brain. A major goal is to identify the 'chromatin scars'—long lasting epigenetic changes at specific genomic loci—that mediate lifelong changes in disease vulnerability. Among the prominent targets of this work are medium spiny neurons of the nucleus accumbens and pyramidal neurons in prefrontal cortex and ventral hippocampus.The Nestler laboratory has driven innovative use of viral-mediated gene transfer, inducible, cell-type specific mutations in mice, and locus-specific epigenome editing to establish causal links between molecular and behavioral phenomena in animal models. The laboratory also makes creative use of advanced machine learning approaches to derive novel biological insight from large sequencing datasets.
Awards
Dr. Nestler's awards and honors include the Pfizer Scholars Award, the Sloan Research Fellowship, the McKnight Scholar Award, the Jordi-Folch-Pi Memorial Award from the American Society of Neurochemistry, the Efron Award of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, the Pasarow Foundation Award for Neuropsychiatric Research, the NARSAD Distinguished Investigator Award, the Bristol-Myers Squibb Freedom to Discover Neuroscience Research Grant, the Patricia S. Goldman-Rakic Award and the Falcone Prize both from NARSAD, and the Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health from the Institute of Medicine. He received an honorary doctorate from Uppsala University in Sweden in 2011, and the Anna Monika Prize in Depression Research.In 2017, he was awarded the Wilbur Cross Medal by Yale University for distinguished alumnus from the graduate school, and the Paul Hoch Distinguished Service Award from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. In 2019, he received the Redelsheimer Distinguished Award in Biological Psychiatry from the Society for Biological Psychiatry. In 2020, Dr. Nestler received an from Concordia University in Montreal as "a pioneer in depression and drug-addiction research and institutional advocacy for equity, diversity and inclusion. He is also the recipient of the Barbara Fish Memorial Award in 2021 for outstanding contributions to the field of neuroscience from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology and the Peter Seeburg Integrative Neuroscience Prize in 2023 from the Schaller-Nikolich Foundation and Society for Neuroscience.
NIH-Funded Grants and Research
| Role | Source, Title | Identifier |
| Principal Investigator | NIDA, Transcriptional Mechanisms of Drug Addiction | P01 DA047233 |
| Principal Investigator | NIDA, Molecular Studies of Cocaine Action in Brain | R01 DA07359 |
| Principal Investigator | NIMH, Epigenetic Mechanisms of Chronic Stress Action | R01 MH129306 |
| Co-Principal Investigator | NIDA, Small Molecule Modulators of ∆FosB Function | R01 DA040621 |
| Co-Principal Investigator | NIDA, Glial-Mediated Synaptic Remodeling in Drug Addiction | R01 DA040620 |
Publications (partial list)
Books
Nestler is the author of Neurobiology of Mental Illness, of Nestler, Hyman and Malenka's ''Molecular Neuropharmacology and two additional books published earlier: Protein Phosphorylation in the Nervous System and Molecular Foundations of Psychiatry''. He is also the author of more than 725 peer-reviewed publications and reviews.Articles
Nestler has been cited more than 186,953 times and has an H-index of 216.*