Matthew Friedman
Senior Advisor (former Executive Director), VA’s National Center for PTSD
Professor of Psychiatry and of Pharmacology at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth
Dr. Matthew J. Friedman received his Ph.D. in pharmacology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1967. He then received an M.D. at the University of Kentucky, Lexington where he also had a post-doctoral fellowship, served on the faculty of the Department of Pharmacology and had a rotating internship. His residency in psychiatry was at the Massachusetts General Hospital (1970-1972) and at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center (1972-1973). He joined the Dartmouth faculty in Psychiatry in 1973 and in Pharmacology and Toxicology in 1976. His major clinical assignment has been at the VA Medical Center, White River Junction, where he served as staff psychiatrist (1973-1978), and Chief of Psychiatry (1978-1989).
He founded and served as Executive Director of the National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), U. S. Department of Veterans Affairs for 24 years. He is now Senior Advisor at the Center and Professor of Psychiatry and of Pharmacology and Toxicology at Dartmouth Medical School. He has worked with PTSD patients as a clinician and researcher for thirty-five years and has published extensively on stress and PTSD, biological psychiatry, psychopharmacology, and clinical outcome studies on depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and chemical dependency. He has over 200 publications, including seventeen books and monographs. Listed in The Best Doctors in America, he is a Distinguished Lifetime Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, past-president of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS), Chair of the scientific advisory board of the Anxiety Disorders Association of America and has served on many VA, DoD and NIMH research, education and policy committees. He has received many honors including the ISTSS Lifetime Achievement Award in 1999 and the ISTSS Public Advocacy Award in 2009. He was a finalist for the 2011 Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal in the Career Achievement Division.