Jonathan Posner, MD, has been promoted to a new role—executive vice chair in the Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences—effective December 1. He will also continue serving in the role of vice chair for research for the department.
As executive vice chair, Posner is the department’s second-ranking leader, working closely with me and partnering with the department’s vice chairs and division directors to ensure operational excellence, mission integration, and alignment with School of Medicine, health system, and university priorities. He’ll provide strategic oversight across clinical care, research, education, faculty development, and administration.
Posner, the J. P. Gibbons Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, joined the department in 2021; previously, he was the Suzanne Crosby Murphy Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia University and the co-director of the Center for Intergenerational Psychiatry at the New York State Psychiatric Institute.
Since coming to Duke, he has shown tremendous leadership in his role as vice chair for research, including initiating several highly successful programs to support faculty, resulting in notable funding successes across multiple groups within the department. He has been honored with an endowed professorship and was recently selected as a Provost Faculty Fellow.
Posner is a board-certified adult, child, and adolescent psychiatrist whose research focuses on neurodevelopment, with an emphasis on MRI approaches to studying neurobiological correlates of mental illness and cognitive development. Recently, he and his Duke University collaborators received a $15 million NIH grant to expand an AI tool to predict teen mental illness. Posner’s work has been published in several leading journals, including JAMA Psychiatry, JAMA Pediatrics, Lancet Psychiatry, and Nature Medicine. He also has extensive experience with mentoring faculty, post-doctoral fellows, residents, and medical students.