John H. Krystal, MD, Chair of the Yale Department of Psychiatry, has been awarded the E.M. Jellinek Memorial Award, one of the highest international honors in the field of alcoholism research.
The Jellinek Fund on May 14 acknowledged Krystal for “his exceptional leadership and cross-disciplinary contributions to our understanding of the pathophysiology of alcoholism.”
From 1991-2011, Krystal led one of the two national VA Alcohol Research Centers, supported by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. Since 2000, Krystal has co-led, with Stephanie O’Malley, PhD, professor of psychiatry, the National Institute of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Center for the Translational Neuroscience of Alcoholism.
Krystal’s research focuses on characterizing the role of the two principal cortical signaling mechanisms in alcoholism risk, alcohol dependence, and alcoholism treatment. He and his wide group of Yale alcohol research collaborators have played important roles in translating advances arising from genetics and animal models into insights about human alcoholism and its treatment. With Robert Rosenheck, MD, professor of psychiatry and of health policy, Krystal also led the first definitive test of the efficacy of naltrexone, an FDA approved medication for the treatment of alcoholism.
Krystal has contributed broadly to the field of alcoholism research. He has served on the NIAAA National Alcohol Advisory Council, the Research Society of Alcoholism (RSA) Board of Directors, and he founded and has led the three International Conferences on Applications of Neuroimaging to Alcoholism.
The Jellinek Memorial Award was established to commemorate the remarkable contribution of Dr. Elvin Mortin “Bunky” Jellinek to the modern scientific study of alcoholism.
With this award to Krystal, the Yale alcoholism research legacy, which began with Jellinek, has come full circle. Jellinek was recruited to Yale in 1939 to lead the newly formed Section of Alcohol Studies. His work at Yale, the World Health Organization, and later Rutgers laid out a research agenda for the field of alcoholism that remains relevant today.
Jellinek worked to establish alcoholism research as a scientific enterprise. To this end, his 1960 book, The Disease Concept of Alcoholism, is a foundational text for the field.
Krystal is the Robert L. McNeil, Jr. Professor of Translational Research, Chair of the Department of Psychiatry, and Professor of Neuroscience at the Yale University School of Medicine. He is Chief of Psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Hospital and Director of the Clinical Neuroscience Division of the VA National Center for PTSD. Also, he is editor of Biological Psychiatry, a leading scientific journal.