Steven E Hyman is the Harald McPike Professor of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology, Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor, and a Core Institute Member of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard where he directs the Broad Program in Brain Health. He is principal investigator of the Psychiatric Biomarkers Network (PBN), a multisite academic-industry consortium discovering fluid biomarkers for schizophrenia-bipolar spectrum disorders and creating a repository for sharing data and samples.
From 2001 to 2011 Hyman served as Harvard University Provost (chief academic officer) with a special focus on building interdisciplinary collaborations, including internationally. From 1996 to 2001 he was Director of the US National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) where he modernized its research portfolio, emphasizing neuroscience, emerging genomic technologies, and initiating a series of large pragmatic clinical trials to inform practice. He has served as Editor of the Annual Review of Neuroscience (2002-2016), founding President of the International Neuroethics Society (2008-2013), President of the Society for Neuroscience (2015), and President of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (2018). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) where he chaired the Forum on Neuroscience and Nervous System Disorders (2012-2018), served on the NAM governing Council (2012-2018) and on the governing board of the National Research Council, the operating arm of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2016-2019). He chairs the Boards of Directors of the Charles A. Dana Foundation (NY) and the Wyss Center for Bio and Neuroengineering (Geneva, Switzerland). In the private sector he is a Director of Voyager Therapeutics and Vesalius Therapeutics, and a founder of Emugen Therapeutics. He serves on the Scientific Advisory Boards of J&J Innovative Medicines and F-Prime Capital. He received his BA, summa cum laude, from Yale, an MA from the University of Cambridge, where he was a Mellon fellow studying History and Philosophy of Science, and an MD, cum laude, from Harvard Medical School.
Teaching
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GenEd 1064 (Formerly SCRB 187)Brains, Identity, and Moral Agency
Advances in brain science have the potential to diminish many forms of human suffering and disability that are rooted in disordered brain function. But what are the ethical implications involved in altering the structure and function of human brains? What’s at stake when we have the ability to alter a person’s narrative identity, create brain-computer interfaces, and manipulate social and moral emotion? In this course, you will ask and attempt to answer these questions, and discuss the implications of mechanistic explanations of decision-making and action for widely-held concepts of moral agency and legal culpability. This course will prepare you to be a thoughtful citizen of a world characterized by rapidly emerging understandings of human brain function, and by new technologies intended to repair or influence human brains.
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SCRB 185Brain Development, Risk of Mental Illness, and New Approaches to Treatment Development
What is mental illness? How well can we distinguish illness from normal variation in cognition and behavior? Why in most cases do patients present with symptoms by age twenty? This course will explore mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric disorders through the lens of autism spectrum disorder, which begins in early childhood, and schizophrenia, which begins during adolescence. In exploring vulnerability and pathogenesis, the course will weave together material that spans human genetics and environmental exposures, human brain development and neural circuit formation, and remodeling of brain circuits by experience. Given the complexity of the brain and its disorders and the limited access to living human brains, the course will also explore and evaluate our sources of knowledge, our model systems such as human brain organoid models, and our technologies such as brain-computer interfaces. The course will highlight experimental approaches poised to elucidate disease mechanisms and deliver much needed therapeutics for some of the most devastating pathologies of our time.