Steven Kushner

Steven A. Kushner, M.D., Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychiatry at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. Dr. Kushner’s research focuses on the genetics and biological mechanisms underlying neurodevelopmental and psychiatric disorders, employing a combination of clinical, translational, and fundamental neuroscience approaches.

His work focuses on leveraging human genetics and fundamental neuroscience to uncover pathophysiological mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric disorders and define improved clinical strategies for the diagnosis, prevention, and treatment of mental illness. He is a founding member of the ENCORE Center for Neurodevelopmental Disorders and former Director of the Center for Population Neuroscience at Erasmus MC. He is also former Program Director at the Institute for Human Organ and Disease Model Technologies as well as President of the Netherlands Society for Neuroscience, and the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies – Kavli Institute Network of Excellence Scholar. Dr. Kushner has led and contributed to multiple psychiatric genetics and functional genomics studies aimed at identifying causal neurobiological mechanisms of severe mental illness.

His group has also ascertained the largest prospective global cohort for women with first-onset post-partum psychosis, which led to the establishment of a highly effective protocol for the prophylactic prevention of post-partum psychosis in women at high risk. Dr. Kushner’s ongoing research includes studies on the genetic discovery of psychiatric disorders, the severe neurodevelopmental delay and intellectual disability as well as translational neuroscience approaches and innovative model systems used to identify novel therapeutic targets, including human iPSC modelling and ex vivo studies of human cerebral cortex.