The Faculty of Psychology of the University of Basel founded in 1460 hereby confers all the dignity, rights, and privileges of an honorary doctorate in Psychology upon Mr. Thomas R. Insel, MD from Dayton, Ohio, USA

in acknowledgement of his outstanding contributions to the improvement of psychiatric nosology;

in acknowledgment of his services to establishing psychopathology and psychiatry as integral parts of modern neurosciences;

and in acknowledgement of his commitment to disseminating his knowledge for educational and therapeutic benefit.

Dr. Thomas R Insel is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist who is currently President and Co-Founder of Mindstrong Health in Palo Alto, California.  Dr. Insel was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1951, the youngest of four brothers all of whom became physician scientists.  He was educated at Boston University graduating with undergraduate and medical degrees in 1974.  He completed post-graduate training in psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco in 1979 when that program was a leader in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. 

The first phase of Insel’s career was as a research psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health(NIMH) in Bethesda, Maryland.  In the early 1980’s the NIMH was leading the biological revolution in psychiatry, moving the field away from psychoanalysis.  Insel launched one of the first studies of obsessive-compulsive disorder, demonstrating that certain anti-depressant medications, specifically those that worked through the neurotransmitter serotonin, were effective for people with obsessive-compulsive disorder.  This was the first evidence that so-called “serotonin-selective reuptake inhibitors” or SSRIs could have unique clinical properties and led to the development of a series of medications for treating both depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In the mid-1980’s, Insel re-trained (at Johns Hopkins University) in neuroscience and shifted his focus to the brain mechanisms for emotion and behavior.  Initially his focus was obsessions and anxiety in rodents and monkeys, but he moved gradually into studying more positive states to explore how the brain changes during social attachment.  In his NIMH laboratory in Poolesville, Maryland he defined the role of the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin in maternal behavior, showing that specific brain receptors for these hormones mediated maternal care.  Using a similar approach, he found that these same neuropeptides were critical for social attachment in monogamous mammals, especially prairie voles, which had these receptors in key brain areas for reward.  Non-monogamous mammals, by contrast, either had fewer receptors or expressed these receptors in other brain regions.

From 1994-2002, Insel continued this work with his colleagues at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia where he was Director of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center as well as Professor of Psychiatry.  With his colleague Larry Young, his research described the molecular changes associated with monogamy, including changes in the oxytocin receptor gene that determined its regional expression in the brain and served as an evolutionary mechanism of monogamy.  Building on this social neuroscience focus, Insel founded and directed the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience across 8 colleges and universities in Atlanta.

In 2002, Insel’s career shifted again, this time to public service.  He returned to the NIMH, now as Director, responsible for guiding and funding research on brain and behavior for the US.  During his tenure, he focused on genomics, neuroimaging, and neuroplasticity as new opportunities to understand and treat mental illness.  He argued for the need to transform diagnosis away from counting symptoms and towards the mechanisms of mental disorders.  And he increased funding for autism research.  Insel co-directed President Obama’s BRAIN Initiative.  He also developed and served as Acting Director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Science, the first new NIH institute since 2000.

In 2015, Insel was recruited by Google to lead a mental health team for its emerging life science company, Verily.  After launching this team, he left Verily to co-found Mindstrong Health, a Silicon Valley start-up dedicated to transforming mental healthcare with technology.  This fourth and current phase of his career includes living on a small farm in rural California with his wife of 5 decades, very near his children and 5 grandchildren.

Dr. Insel is the author of over 300 scientific publications, author or editor of 4 books (including the Neurobiology of Maternal Behavior co-authored with Michael Numan), and the recipient of many awards including honorary degrees in the US and Europe.