NEW HAVEN — John Harrison Krystal, MD, has been appointed chief of psychiatry at Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital (YNHPH) and chair of the department of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, where he is the Robert L. McNeil, Jr., Professor of Translational Research.

Dr. Krystal is director of the Center for the Translational Neuroscience of Alcoholism, funded at Yale by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism. He also heads the clinical neuroscience division of the Veterans Affairs National Center for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the Veterans Affairs Alcohol Research Center at Yale. He has served as the department's deputy chair for research since 2000.

With more than two decades of distinguished academic, clinical and administrative achievements to his credit, Dr. Krystal is an internationally renowned expert on the neurobiology and treatment of schizophrenia, alcoholism, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. His work is distinguished by its emphasis on translational neuroscience, the effort to combine emerging brain imaging and molecular genetic technologies with psychopharmacology to better understand alterations in brain function associated with psychiatric disorders. He also edits Biological Psychiatry, a leading journal in the fields of psychiatry and neuroscience.

A 1980 graduate of University of Chicago, Dr. Krystal earned his medical degree from Yale School of Medicine and became a member of the faculty in 1988 after serving an internship at the Hospital of Saint Raphael and a post doctoral fellowship in psychiatry at Yale.

Last year, the department of psychiatry at Yale ranked second nationally among medical school psychiatry departments receiving funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), with a total of $53 million in NIH awards for the year. Yale-New Haven Hospital's psychiatry services were ranked number 11 in the country in the 2009 U.S. News and World Report. The department provides care to patients at the Veterans Affairs healthcare system in Connecticut, the Connecticut Mental Health Center and the Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital, a 73-bed inpatient psychiatric facility that is part of Yale-New Haven Hospital.

Yale-New Haven Hospital is a 944-bed, not-for-profit hospital serving as the primary teaching hospital for the Yale School of Medicine. Yale-New Haven was founded as the fourth voluntary hospital in the U.S. in 1826 and today, the hospital complex includes Yale-New Haven Children's Hospital and Yale-New Haven Psychiatric Hospital, with a combined medical staff of about 3,400 university and community physicians practicing in more than 100 specialties. Visit www.ynhh.org for additional information.