Dr. John H. Krystal is recognized “for the discovery of the rapid antidepressant actions of ketamine, the most important clinical advance in psychiatry in the current era, leading to the development of esketamine, the first mechanistically novel FDA-approved antidepressant in over 50 years.”
Dr. Krystal is a leading expert on the neurobiology and treatment of psychiatric disorders. His work links psychopharmacology, neuroimaging, molecular genetics, and computational neuroscience to study the neurobiology and treatment of disorders, including alcohol use disorder, depression, PTSD, and schizophrenia.
He and his collaborators identified mechanisms in patients underlying these antidepressant effects: enhanced glutamate release (13C-MRS), restoration of cortical functional connectivity deficits (fMRI), restoration of synaptic density (PET), and novel mechanisms for enhancing or sustaining these effects via mTORC1 inhibition and glycine-site NMDA-R modulation. He also studied the neurobiology and treatment of alcohol use disorder, PTSD, and schizophrenia. He identified the first biological mechanism in PTSD with his colleagues in the early 1990s. Most recently, he co-founded the National PTSD Brain Bank and co-led the first well-powered transcriptomic study of PTSD. His studies of schizophrenia identified cortical mechanisms underlying symptoms and predicted the emergence of drugs that could treat schizophrenia without blocking dopamine D2 receptors. The first drug of this type, Cobenfy, was approved by the FDA in 2024.
Dr. Krystal earned his BA in Behavioral Sciences from the University of Chicago in 1980, his MD from Yale University School of Medicine in 1984, and completed psychiatry residency training at Yale University in 1988. He is a co-inventor with several patents that have been licensed or are being licensed to pharmaceutical or digital healthcare companies. In addition, he has contributed to the founding of two pharmaceutical companies – Biohaven Pharmaceuticals and Freedom Biosciences.
Within Yale, he currently chairs the Department of Psychiatry, serves as Chief of Psychiatry for the Yale-New Haven Health System, co-leads the Yale Center for Clinical Investigation (CTSA), co-directs the NIAAA Center for the Translational Neuroscience of Alcohol, and leads the Clinical Neuroscience Division of the National Center for PTSD (VA).
His major recent awards include the Sarnat Prize of the National Academy of Medicine (2023), the ACNP Barbara Fish Memorial Award (2023), the American Psychiatric Association Nasarallah Family Neuroscience Award (2023), the British Pharmacologic Society’s Sir John Gaddam Memorial Lecture and Medal (2022), and the Gold Medal Award of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (2018).
Dr. Krystal is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine and the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering (CASE), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and past co-chair of the Neuroscience Forum of the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. He chaired the NIMH Board of Scientific Counselors and served on the National Advisory Councils for NIMH and NIAAA. As editor of Biological Psychiatry since 2006, he oversaw the creation of a family of journals, including BP: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging (2015) and BP: Global Open Science (2020). He is a past president of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) and the International College of Neuropsychopharmacology (CINP).