Rene S Kahn MD

Summary

• Following medical school, I served in the Royal Army of the Netherlands as a first lieutenant, then trained as a psychiatrist in Utrecht and as a neurologist in Amsterdam. I subsequently moved to New York City for a research fellowship in biological psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, completed my psychiatry residency at Mount Sinai Hospital, and worked as chief of the psychiatry research unit at the Bronx VA. I moved back to Utrecht in 1993 to be chair of psychiatry at the University Medical Center, and took over leadership of the Brain Center Rudolf Magnus—a hub of research in basic neuroscience, psychiatry, and neurology. In 2017, I returned to Manhattan for my current position, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
  
  My expertise is in the neurobiology of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders. One of my most important contributions to the field was helping to establish proof that schizophrenia debuts with cognitive dysfunction, preceding the onset of the first incidence of psychosis by more than a decade. My group also showed that brain volume is one of the most heritable characteristics, paving the way to link brain volumes in health and disease to genetic variation.
  
  My research has been supported by multiple international grants, and I have served on neuroscience grant review boards in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and Germany. I have authored or co-authored more than 900 papers, served on the boards of several international research societies, and received several honors including knighthood in the Netherlands; a honorary doctorate at Semmelweis University in Budapest, Hungary; a Fulbright scholarship and the ECNP’s Neuropsychopharmacology Award.

Rene Kahn, MD, PhD
Esther and Joseph Klingenstein Professor and System Chair of Psychiatry at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.