Prof. Joseph Zohar

Prof. Joseph Zohar is Director of Psychiatry A and Director of the Anxiety and Obsessive Compulsive Clinic of this institute. He graduated from Tel Aviv University Sackler School of Medicine in 1973, trained in psychiatry at the University of Washington, Seattle and at the Jerusalem Mental Health Center, Israel, where he was the director of the Resistant Depression Unit. In 1984, Prof. Zohar joined the laboratory of Dr. Dennis Murphy at the National Institute of Mental Health, Bethesda, Maryland ,where he was acting director of the Obsessive-Compulsive Clinic. In 1986 he served as chairperson on the panel for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder of the American Psychiatric Association Task Force on Treatments of Psychiatric Disorders in 1989 and as a member of the DSM-IV Obsessive Compulsive subcommittee. In 1992, Prof. Zohar established the International Council on Anxiety and OCD that is currently entitled World Council on Anxiety, and in 1993 he was nominated as the chairperson of the anxiety and OCD section of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) along with his role as the chairperson of the World Council on Anxiety.In 1994 he was the chairperson of the 7th meeting of the European College of Neuropharmacology (ECNP) and in 1995 was elected as a member of the executive committee of this organization and as the chairperson of the Israel Society for Biological Psychiatry. In 1996 Prof. Zohar was nominated as a member of the WHO Expert Advisory Panel on Neuroscience. In 1997 he was elected to the executive committee of the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry. Prof. Zohar is the associate editor of the World Journal of Biological Psychiatry, the international editor of the journal CNS Spectrum and is also on the editorial boards of several journals, including European Psychiatry, International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice and Neuropsychobiology. He is the author of more than 100 scientific papers and has edited 11 books focusing on refractory depression, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, and PTSD. Prof. Zohar founded of the Israeli consortium on PTSD, is currently the commander of the chief installation of the Israeli Defense Force for treating PTSD, and he is serving as a special advisor to the Ministry of Defense in relation to PTSD. Prof. Zohar has received numerous awards, including: Fogarty International Research Fellowship Award, in 1984; A.E. Bennet Award for Clinical Research in 1986; European College of Neuropsychopharmacology – Lilly Neuroscience Award for Clinical Research in 1998; World Federation Society of Biological Psychiatry on excellency in education in 2001, and he is the co-author of the A.E. Bennet Award for 2002 for a study on an animal model of PTSD.