Professor Steven E. Hyman, MD, is Distinguished Service Professor at Harvard University and a Visiting Scholar at the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT. He was Provost of Harvard University from 2001 to 2011. As Provost, he was instrumental in the development of cross school and regional interdisciplinary initiatives, especially in the sciences. In 2009 he initiated an extensive process of reform of the Harvard libraries, the world's largest university library system with major goals that included support for technical innovation in research and teaching and for open access to academic work. He has been important in the creation of an open access mandate at Harvard, and he sits on the board of trustees of BioMed Central.
From 1996 to 2001 he was the Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a group of agencies that fund and perform biomedical research. NIMH supports neuroscience and the knowledge needed to understand, diagnose, and treat brain disorders. He has worked, more recently to open psychiatric classifications, including the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and the International Classification of Diseases, Mental and Behavioral Disorders to fundamental rethinking including the incorporation of neuroscience and genetics the recognition that many mental disorders are quantitative deviations from health rather than categorically different.
His degrees are from Yale College, the University of Cambridge, Harvard Medical School. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.