Schahram Akbarian studied medicine and conducted his thesis work on the central representation of the primate vestibular system at the Freie Universitaet Berlin, Germany.  He is a board-certified psychiatrist and molecular neuroscientist who trained at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, and the University of California at Irvine.  In 2002, he joined the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester where he established a research program in psychiatric epigenetics and served as the Director of the Brudnick Neuropsychiatric Research Institute.  Presently, he heads the Division of Psychiatric Epigenomics in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

He is a former recipient of the Klerman award from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation, the Judith Silver Memorial award of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, the Outstanding resident award of the National Institute of Mental Health, and the Eva King Killam Research Award of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. In 2018, Dr. Akbarian was awarded the Lieber Prize for Outstanding Achievement in Schizophrenia Research.  He is also an NIH Director’s Pioneer Awardee for HIV AIDS and Substance Use Disorder Research.  Dr. Akbarian has been a principal investigator on National Institutes of Health-funded research projects and grants since 2001 and published over 200 articles in scientific journals and book chapters. He is a member of professional societies such as the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) and presently serves on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF, formerly NARSAD), the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Service members (Army STARRS). He serves on Editorial Boards of various journals in the field, including Biological Psychiatry, Neuropsychopharmacology, Schizophrenia Bulletin and European Neuropsychopharmacology. 

Visit Dr. Akbarian's Laboratory of Epigenetic Regulation of the Human Brain and Mount Sinai Conte Center on Epigenetic Mechanisms of Depression for more information.