Conan Kornetsky, Ph.D.

Conan Kornetsky, born February 9, 1926 in Portland, Maine, graduated in 1943 from Portland High School and from the University of Maine, Orono in 1948 and served in the US Army Air Corps in 1944-45. He received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology with a minor in physiology from the University of Kentucky in 1952. Throughout his graduate program at the University of Kentucky, he worked under the direction of Harris Isbell and Abraham Wikler at the Research Department of the USPHS Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, the forerunner of the NIDA Addiction Research Center. In 1952-53, under the auspices of NIMH, he participated in studies of juvenile heroin abuse and with Murray Jarvik at Mt. Sinai Hospital (1953-54) on the effects of LSD on behavior. In 1954 he moved to NIH in Seymour Kety´s Laboratory of Clinical Science leaving in 1959 for Boston University School of Medicine, where he is currently a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Pharmacology. At Boston University he strongly believed that his responsibility was not only to carry out research and give lectures to medical students, but to mentor graduate students. He found that mentoring graduate students was as reinforcing to him as was the reinforcement of the research itself.