In general, your papers are highly cited. Can you explain why this is so?

Investigators, both basic and clinical, have different styles. Some work in a single area for a lifetime. Others, like myself, are blessed (or cursed) with a multitude of interests. I have, therefore, published in a wide variety of areas in neuroscience and psychiatry, ranging from the mechanism(s) of action of antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs, to functional brain imaging studies in patients with major psychiatric disorders, and clinical treatment trials of novel agents in the management of mood disorders. I have also been blessed with great students and colleagues.

After graduating from college, I accepted a position as a research assistant in a laboratory at McLean Hospital, a psychiatric hospital that served as a major teaching site in the Harvard system. I was exposed to grand rounds and research seminars, as well as to psychiatric patients.

While an inpatient-attending psychiatrist at Duke University Medical Center in the early 1980s, I noted an inordinately high rate of early-life trauma in patients in the hospital with a diagnosis of major depression.

I am probably best known for conducting translational research, i.e., research at the interface of basic neuroscience and clinical psychiatry, essentially from the bench to the bedside, before it was fashionable.

Our demonstration in rodents, nonhuman primates, and humans that early-life trauma is associated with a multitude of persistent neurobiological consequences that likely underlie the increased vulnerability of child abuse victims to depression, anxiety, and suicide throughout life will probably have the greatest impact on the field. I am also particularly proud of the recently published book, The Peace of Mind Prescription (Houghton Mifflin), authored by Dennis Charney and me, which is a guide for patients and families on the causes and treatment of mood and anxiety disorders.

Predictors of response to antidepressants, predictors of suicidal behavior, CNS consequences of child abuse, and development of novel antipsychotics and antidepressants.

As in all fields of medicine, new technologies provide tools that allow questions to be answered that previously were unanswerable. Such examples include functional brain imaging, the polymerase chain reaction, siRNA, knockout and knock-in techniques, etc. The new technologies listed in this question will likewise allow for major new advances. Nanoscale technology considerably increases the successful development of chips for central nervous system implantation designed to regionally increase or decrease expression of specific genes.

I have been editor-in-chief for four years and, in that time, the journal's impact factor has markedly improved; its impact factor is 5.2. In 2003, it was the fifth-ranked journal of 87 in Psychiatry, 23rd of 198 in Neuroscience, and 14th of 185 in Pharmacology & Pharmacy. Our goal is to further improve this by maintaining our high selectivity (high rejection rate) and minimal publication delay after acceptance.

I currently have, and have had in the past, fabulous undergraduate, graduate, and medical students, residents, fellows, junior and senior faculty, colleagues, and collaborators, both in my own university and elsewhere, and a superb support staff. A great team is essential for efficiency, but also for creativity and the ability to turn "work" into fun. My wife, Gayle, and our children, are wonderful in terms of understanding the professional demands on my time.

I began studying the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Dwight Evans and I confirmed and extended the observations of other researchers, showing that depressed patients had hyperactivity of the HPA axis. The more severe the patient’s depression, the greater was the HPA axis hyperactivity. This could be quantified by measuring the amount of the anterior pituitary hormone adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) in these patients’ blood samples. Once the hypothalamic peptide, corticotropin releasing factor (CRF), which controls the secretion of ACTH, was discovered, we found that CRF levels were higher in cerebrospinal fluid that was taken via spinal tap from depressed patients than they were in people who were not suffering from depression. Antidepressant drugs normalize the levels of CRF.

Our laboratory has been studying the role of depression in the etiology of disease, including coronary artery disease, stroke, and breast cancer, among others.

For many years, I have been listed in the Best Doctors in America. It is, perhaps, not generally known that I am quite active in providing clinical services and see about ten patients per week. Many of these are psychiatric patients referred to me by psychiatrists in the Atlanta community and from throughout the U.S., whom I evaluate because they are treatment refractory to standard treatments.