Dr. Alan Gelenberg will be joining Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center and the Penn State College of Medicine as professor and interim chair of psychiatry, effective Jan. 1. Gelenberg currently is clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin, as well as president and CEO of Healthcare Technology Systems. Prior to that, he was professor and head of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona for 18 years. Gelenberg previously served on the faculty at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital for 19 years and also held a faculty appointment at M.I.T.
“We are pleased to have someone of Dr. Gelenberg’s caliber join the Penn State faculty,” said Dr. Harold L. Paz, Medical Center chief executive officer, senior vice president for health affairs for Penn State, and dean of the College of Medicine. “His accomplishments as a physician, an experienced administrator and as a leader in the field of psychiatry make him a tremendous asset to the college, the Medical Center and Penn State.”
A native of Philadelphia, Pa., Gelenberg received a bachelor's degree from Columbia University and a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania. After an internship in internal medicine, he completed his residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital. Since 1987, he has served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and has authored more than 200 scientific articles, editorials and book chapters, including manuscripts in the Lancet, New England Journal of Medicine and Journal of the American Medical Association. Listed in The Best Doctors in America and America’s Top Doctors, he received the 1997 Exemplary Psychiatrist Award of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill.
Gelenberg chairs the American Psychiatric Association’s (APA) workgroup on Treatment Guidelines for Major Depressive Disorder, worked with a joint APA/AMA taskforce on similar guidelines for primary care and currently is on a committee advising the U.S. Centers for Disease Control on depression. He helped develop the ASEX scale to track sexual side effects of antidepressants. In addition, Gelenberg has served on several committees of the National Institute of Mental Health and is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the APA, former chair of its Committee on Research on Psychiatric Treatments, past president of the West Coast College of Biological Psychiatry and a fellow of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology. He is on the board of directors of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology, the professional advisory council of the Neuroleptic Malignant Syndrome Information Service, and the scientific advisory board of the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance.