Dr. Maurizio Fava is the psychiatrist-in-chief at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), director of the division of clinical research at the MGH Research Institute, executive director of the Clinical Trials Network and Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital, and the associate dean for clinical and translational research, as well as the Slater Family Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Fava is a world-leader in the field of depression. He has edited eight books and authored or co-authored more than 800 original articles published in medical journals with international circulation— articles which have been cited more than 75,000 times in literature and with an h index of over 135.
Dr. Fava obtained his medical degree from the University of Padova School of Medicine and completed residency training in endocrinology at the same university. He then moved to the United States and completed residency training in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. He founded and was director of the hospital’s depression clinical and research program from 1990-2014. In 2007, he also founded and is now the executive director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Clinical Trials Network and Institute, the first academic CRO specialized in the coordination of multi-center clinical trials in psychiatry.
Under Dr. Fava’s direction, the depression clinical and research program became one of the most highly regarded depression programs in the country, a model for academic programs that link, in a bi-directional fashion, clinical and research work.
Dr. Fava has been successful in obtaining funding as principal or co-principal investigator from both the National Institutes of Health and other sources for a total of more than $120 million. Dr. Fava’s prominence in the field is reflected in his role as the co-principal investigator of STAR*D, the largest research study ever conducted in depression, and of the RAPID Network, the NIMH-funded series of studies of novel, rapidly acting antidepressant therapies.
Dr. Fava has received several awards during his career and is on the editorial board of five international medical journals. Since 1990, Dr. Fava has also mentored more than 50 trainees, who have gone on to become lead investigators in the area of psychiatry. With Dr. David Schoenfeld, he developed a novel design (with over five patents) to address the problem of excessive placebo response in drug trials and to markedly reduce sample size requirements for these trials. In 2009, Dr. Fava received the A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard Medical School, and, in 2013, the John T. Potts, Jr., MD Faculty Mentoring Award from Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also the former president of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology.
Dr. Fava is a well-known national and international lecturer, having given more than 300 presentations at national and international meetings.