Kenneth L. Davis, M.D.

President and CEO of The Mount Sinai Medical Center

Gustave L. Levy Distinguished Professor

Dr. Davis, internationally renowned for his pioneering research on psychiatric disorders, was appointed President and CEO of The Mount Sinai Medical Center in 2003. His achievements as an educator, clinician and administrator have earned him a prominent place among the national leaders of academic medicine. Prior to being appointed Dean in 2003, Dr. Davis served as chairman of the Mount Sinai Department of Psychiatry. During his fifteen-year tenure in that position, he led the Department through a period of phenomenal growth. He was the first director of the Schizophrenia Biological Research Center at the Bronx Veteran’s Affairs Medical Center, an affiliate of Mount Sinai; he directed Mount Sinai’s NIH funded Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center; and he currently serves as director of the Silivo O. Conte Center on the Neuroscience of Mental Disorder.

Dr. Davis’s primary research foci have been Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and schizophrenia. His early work on AD included groundbreaking proof of concept studies and the first multicenter clinical trial of cholinesterase inhibitors, which established their efficacy and ultimately led to the first four FDA approved compounds for treatment of the symptoms of AD. A tool he developed to assess the efficacy of new treatments for AD is the mostly widely used in the world. He contributed to the identification of the link between personality disorders and fundamental biological processes that are related to affective disorder and schizophrenia. His work on schizophrenia has produced paradigm shifts in the way in which the disease is viewed. He demonstrated that dopamine, which had been thought to be hyperactive throughout the brains of schizophrenics, is hyperactive in some brain regions and hypoactive in others. More recently he and his colleagues have produced a sea change in the study of this disease when he discovered that cells called oligodendroglia and myelin (the substance that coats neurons) are involved in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.

The author or co-author of hundreds of scientific articles, Dr. Davis has been recognized by ISI as one of the most highly cited researchers in his field. Dr. Davis is a member of the editorial boards of numerous journals, and has received many awards and honors, including election to membership in the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in October 2001. He was elected President of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology for the 2006 year.

Most recently, Dr. Davis was elected Chairman of the Board of Governors for the Greater New York Hospital Association for 2006-2007 (one-year term), elected as a Trustee of The New York Academy of Medicine in 2006 (four-year term), and serves as Chair for the New York Academy of Medicine Deans Council.

Dr. Davis did his undergraduate work at Yale College where he graduated magna cum laude and earned his M.D. from Mount Sinai and received the Harold Elster Memorial Award for highest academic achievement. He completed graduate medical education at Stanford University Medical Center. In 1979, Dr. Davis returned to NY and joined the faculty at Mount Sinai, becoming Chief of Psychiatry at the Bronx Veterans Administration Medical Center. In 1987 he was appointed Chairman of Psychiatry, Mount Sinai School of Medicine and he remained in that position until 2003.