Paul R. McHugh

Paul R. McHugh, M.D. is University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry and a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He was for twenty-six years the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Dr. McHugh was elected a member of the National Academy of Medicine (formerly the Institute of Medicine) in 1992. From 2002 to 2009, he was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.

He received his medical education at Harvard Medical School (obtaining his M.D. in 1956) and did an internship at the Peter Bent Brigham (now Brigham and Women’s Hospital) and a neurology and neuropathology residency at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He continued his education in psychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, University of London and in the Division of Neuropsychiatry at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. After his training, he was eventually and successively Professor of Psychiatry at Cornell University School of Medicine, and Clinical Director and Director of Residency Education at the New York Hospital Westchester Division; Professor and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Oregon Health Sciences Center; and from 1975 to 2001, Henry Phipps Professor of Psychiatry and Director of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Johns Hopkins Hospital, and Professor of Mental Hygiene, Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health.

Dr. McHugh was the founder and first director of the Bourne Behavioral Research Laboratory of New York Hospital, Westchester Division at Cornell. From 1984 to 1989, he was chairman of the medical board of Johns Hopkins Hospital. From 1985 to 1991, he was chairman of the professorial promotions committee at Hopkins School of Medicine. He also was the leader of the Blades Center for Clinical Practice and Research in Alcohol/Drug Dependence; the co-chairman of the ethics committee of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology; the chairman of the NIH Bio-Psychology Study Section; and a trustee of the Association for Research in Nervous and Mental Disease.

He is the author or coauthor of several books, including, most recently, Try to Remember: Psychiatry’s Clash over Meaning, Memory, and Mind (Dana Press, 2008).