Philip Seeman was born in Winnipeg, Canada. He received a B.Sc. and an M.D. from McGill University. He received a Ph.D. in Life Sciences in 1966, working with Dr. George Palade (1974 Nobel Laureate, Medicine/Physiology) at Rockefeller University. Since 1967 he has been at the University of Toronto, Department of Pharmacology, and served as its Chairman between 1977 and 1987. He is cross-appointed as a Professor of Psychiatry, and has held the University's Tanenbaum Chair in Neuroscience. His work between 1964 and 1974 on the membrane actions of drugs led him to his discovery of the antipsychotic receptor, now re-named the dopamine D2 receptor. This research forms an experimental basis for the dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia. In 1990-91 Dr. Seeman and his research group, including H.B. Niznik, H. Van Tol and R. Sunahara, cloned three dopamine receptors: D1, D4 and D5.
He has trained over 100 graduate students and Fellows. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has received 25 awards, including the Lieber Award of NARSAD (the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression), the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Society for Biological Psychiatry, the Ariens Receptor award of the Dutch Pharmacology Society, the Stanley Dean Award of the American College of Psychiatrists, the first Prix Galien award in North America, the Pasarow Foundation award in Neuropsychiatry, the Canada Council Killam Prize, and the Order of Canada. He has written approximately 750 publications.
Dr. Madras is Professor of Psychobiology at Harvard Medical School (HMS), is cross-appointed at the Massachusetts General Hospital and founded the Division of Neurochemistry at the HMS Primate Center. She served as Deputy Director for Demand Reduction in the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), a Presidential appointment confirmed unanimously by the Senate. Her discoveries in addiction neurobiology and pharmacology informed her development of candidate medications and brain imaging probes, the latter widely used in clinical research of drug mechanisms, neurotoxicity, Parkinson's disease diagnosis, ADHD, other neuropsychiatric disorders. The Division also developed naturalistic primate genotype/phenotype models of psychiatric disorders. Her current research focuses on molecular adaptations which conceivably alter the trajectory of brain development in adolescent drug users. She has authored numerous scientific manuscripts, co-edited the "The Cell Biology of Addiction , and received 19 patents with collaborators. Her commitment to academic and public education is reflected in her mentorship of students, creation of courses on addiction biology (HMS, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) and a Boston Museum of Science exhibit and CD (licensed by Disney Corp. in 2006) on how drugs affect the brain. At ONDCP, her public health approach to Demand Reduction featured medicalization of Screening, Brief Intervention, Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) services. She spearheaded approval of SBIRT CPT® Medicaid and Medicare billing codes, web-based screening/training, and a UN endorsement of SBIRT. Recognition includes NIH-NIDA MERIT, Public Service and Career Scientist awards, an American Academy of Addiction Psychiatry Founders' Award, Marian Fischman Award, and designation of the imaging agent altropane in "The Better World Report, 2006 , as one of "25 technology transfer innovations that changed the world . She has delivered hundreds of presentations on addiction and related topics to various groups nationally and globally.
