Thomas Roland Insel is an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 neuroscientist

Neuroscientist

A neuroscientist is an individual who studies the scientific field of neuroscience or any of its related sub-fields...

 and psychiatrist

Psychiatrist

A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders. All psychiatrists are trained in diagnostic evaluation and in psychotherapy...

 who has led the National Institute of Mental Health

National Institute of Mental Health

The National Institute of Mental Health is one of 27 institutes and centers that make up the National Institutes of Health...

 (NIMH) since 2002. Prior to becoming Director of NIMH, he was Director of the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience at Emory University

Emory University

Emory University is a private research university in metropolitan Atlanta, located in the Druid Hills section of unincorporated DeKalb County, Georgia, United States. The university was founded as Emory College in 1836 in Oxford, Georgia by a small group of Methodists and was named in honor of...

 in Atlanta, Georgia. He is best known for research on oxytocin and vasopressin, two peptide hormone

Peptide hormone

Peptide hormones are a class of peptides that are secreted into the blood stream and have endocrine functions in living animals.Like other proteins, peptide hormones are synthesized in cells from amino acids according to an mRNA template, which is itself synthesized from a DNA template inside the...

s implicated in complex social behaviors, such as parental care and attachment

Attachment

Attachment may refer to:Attachment- An emotional connection. Attachment involves being dependent on someone for something: emotional, mental or physical....

.

Early Years

Born in Dayton, Ohio, Insel was the youngest of four sons. His father, H. Herbert Insel, was an ophthalmologist who moved the family from Ohio to Silver Spring, MD in 1960. There, the precocious Insel earned his Eagle Scout badge just after turning 13, began college courses at age 14 and left high school to enroll in the Boston University Combined Pre-Med- Medical Program, where he focused on English literature, at age 15. By age 17, having completed most of the requirements for his pre-medical degree and still below draft age, Insel began exploring the world. He hitch-hiked across Canada and through the West, married Deborah Silber soon after his 18th birthday, then traveled with her around the world, stopping to work at a TB clinic in Hong Kong and a mission hospital in Bihar, India.

From 1970-1974 Insel attended Boston University

Boston University

Boston University is a private research university located in Boston, Massachusetts. With more than 4,000 faculty members and more than 31,000 students, Boston University is one of the largest private universities in the United States and one of Boston's largest employers...

 Medical School with plans to return to Asia working in tropical medicine. These plans changed with exposure to two prominent Boston neuroscientists: Walle Nauta at MIT and Norman Geschwind at Harvard Medical School

Harvard Medical School

Harvard Medical School is the graduate medical school of Harvard University. It is located in the Longwood Medical Area of the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts....

. Following medical school, he trained in psychiatry at University California San Francisco (1976-1979) including a Jungian psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis

Psychoanalysis is a psychological theory developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud. Psychoanalysis has expanded, been criticized and developed in different directions, mostly by some of Freud's former students, such as Alfred Adler and Carl Gustav...

 and a first exposure to research with Irwin Feinberg.

Research Career

Following clinical training, Insel joined the NIMH as a clinical fellow working with Dennis Murphy. In 1980 he began the first U.S. research project on the biology of adults with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), which was then largely treated with psychoanalysis. Following initial reports from Sweden, Insel was the first to demonstrate scientifically that an experimental serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant, clomipramine

Clomipramine

Clomipramine is a tricyclic antidepressant . It was developed in the 1960s by the Swiss drug manufacturer Geigy and has been in clinical use worldwide ever since.- Indications :...

, was effective for treating OCD. This observation not only launched the neuropharmacological study of OCD, it suggested the importance of developing the SSRI class of antidepressant

Antidepressant

An antidepressant is a psychiatric medication used to alleviate mood disorders, such as major depression and dysthymia and anxiety disorders such as social anxiety disorder. According to Gelder, Mayou &*Geddes people with a depressive illness will experience a therapeutic effect to their mood;...

s, which became a mainstay for treating both depression and OCD in the 1990’s.

Following this foray into clinical research, Insel moved from the clinic into the laboratory to study the neurobiology of emotion

Emotion

Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...

. Beginning in the NIMH Laboratory of Brain Evolution and Behavior started by Paul Maclean in Poolesville, MD, his group developed some of the classic studies for investigating social behavior

Social behavior

In physics, physiology and sociology, social behavior is behavior directed towards society, or taking place between, members of the same species. Behavior such as predation which involves members of different species is not social...

 in animals, from ultrasonic vocalizations in rodent pups to social attachment in prairie vole

Prairie Vole

The Prairie Vole is a small vole found in central North America. The vole has long, coarse grayish-brown fur on the upper portion of the body and yellowish fur on the lower portion of the body...

s to paternal care in marmoset

Marmoset

Marmosets are the 22 New World monkey species of the genera Callithrix, Cebuella, Callibella, and Mico. All four genera are part of the biological family Callitrichidae. The term marmoset is also used in reference to the Goeldi's Monkey, Callimico goeldii, which is closely related.Most marmosets...

s. A major focus was oxytocin, known to support lactation

Lactation

Lactation describes the secretion of milk from the mammary glands and the period of time that a mother lactates to feed her young. The process occurs in all female mammals, however it predates mammals. In humans the process of feeding milk is called breastfeeding or nursing...

 and parturition, but shown in rat

Rat

Rats are various medium-sized, long-tailed rodents of the superfamily Muroidea. "True rats" are members of the genus Rattus, the most important of which to humans are the black rat, Rattus rattus, and the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus...

s to be important for the initiation of maternal care by actions on brain receptors

Receptor (biochemistry)

In biochemistry, a receptor is a molecule found on the surface of a cell, which receives specific chemical signals from neighbouring cells or the wider environment within an organism...

. Oxytocin and the related hormone vasopressin were also found to be critical for pair bonding in adult prairie voles. The Insel lab found that monogamous voles and non-monogamous voles (that did not pair bond) had brain receptors for oxytocin and vasopressin in different brain circuits, suggesting a mechanism for the evolution of monogamy

Monogamy

Monogamy /Gr. μονός+γάμος - one+marriage/ a form of marriage in which an individual has only one spouse at any one time. In current usage monogamy often refers to having one sexual partner irrespective of marriage or reproduction...

in mammals.

In 1994 Insel was recruited to Emory University to direct the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center, the nation’s oldest and internationally one of the largest centers for research on monkeys and great apes. His tenure at Yerkes was marked by a focus on neurobiology and infectious disease, with a specific emphasis on development of an AIDS vaccine. This was also a period of considerable animal rights protests against Yerkes, with Insel and his family targeted by protesters opposed to invasive research with non-human primates.

In 1999 Insel resigned from Yerkes to lead a new $40 million National Science Foundation Science and Technology Center, the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience. This new program used behavioral neuroscience to develop a cross-institutional training and research effort for 7 colleges and universities in Atlanta, with a specific goal of increasing the number of African American undergraduate students participating in neuroscience research.
This period was also a productive phase for social neuroscience research carried out at Emory. Larry Young, Zuoxin Wang, and Jim Winslow and several outstanding graduate students focused on the molecular biology, anatomy, and behavioral properties of oxytocin and vasopressin, providing critical evidence for the role of these neuropeptide systems in complex social behaviors. In his final years at Emory Insel led the team into studies of autism, starting a new NIH funded Autism Center to investigate oxytocin and vasopressin as potential treatments for this disorder of social behavior.

NIMH Director

Insel’s return to become the ninth director of NIMH in 2002 was unexpected, as he had little connection to academic psychiatry or psychology since his OCD research which ended almost twenty years before. At NIMH he quickly focused on serious mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia, bipolar illness, and major depressive disorder with a defining theme of these illnesses as disorders of brain circuits. Building on the genomics revolution, he created large repositories of DNA and funded many of the first large genotyping and sequencing efforts to identify risk genes. He established autism as a major area of focus for NIMH and led a large increase of NIH funding for autism research. Under his leadership, autism, as a developmental brain disorder, became a prototype for mental disorders, most of which also emerge during development. And during his tenure, NIMH became a leader in global mental health, working closely with the World Health Organization and the Global Alliance for Chronic Disease.

Recognition

Insel is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences. He has received the A.E. Bennett Award (1986), the Curt Richter Prize (1991), the Outstanding Service Award from the US Public Health Service (1993), the Sachar Prize (2007), the Outstanding Alumnus Award from Boston University (2009), and the Ipsen Prize (2010).

Publications

In addition to over 200 published scientific articles or chapters, books by Insel include:

Numan, MM and Insel, T.R.: The Neurobiology of Maternal Behavior (Springer Verlag, 2011 in press)

Pedersen C.A., Caldwell, J.D., Jirikowski, G., and Insel, T.R.(eds.): Oxytocin in Maternal, Sexual and Social Behaviors (New York Academy of Sciences Press, 1992)

Zohar, J. , Rasmussen, S., and Insel, T. R. (eds.): The Psychobiology of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (Springer-Verlag, 1991)

Insel, T.R. (ed.): New Findings in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (American Psychiatric Press, Inc., 1984)