Internationally recognized for his significant achievements in alcoholism research and treatment, Dr. Marc A. Schuckit has been a key contributor to the alcohol field for nearly four decades. Dr. Schuckit’s research encompasses several major areas of interest, including the genetics of alcoholism. His pioneering work in this area has focused on evaluating the importance of genetic influences in alcoholism and searching for the biological factors that correlate or interact with the environment to produce vulnerability toward heavy drinking and alcohol problems. Dr. Schuckit’s other research efforts include the search for optimal diagnostic criteria for substance abuse and dependence, work that has contributed to the fourth and the upcoming fifth editions of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Another domain of Dr. Schuckit’s research has focused on the relationships among alcohol and drug dependence and psychiatric syndromes, in particular, depression, anxiety states, and psychoses. Together, his research efforts have resulted in nearly 600 publications in refereed journals and book chapters and the development of ten books, including the recent sixth edition of Dr. Schuckit’s foundational text, first published in 1979, Drug and Alcohol Abuse: A Clinical Guide to Diagnosis and Treatment.
After receiving a medical degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1968, Dr. Schuckit was named the outstanding intern of the year during his medical/surgical internship at Cedars/Sinai Medical Center, in Los Angeles, California. He returned to Washington University to undertake a psychiatric residency and continued at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), where he served as first senior resident. He worked as the special assistant to the commanding officer at the Naval Health Research Laboratories in San Diego before reentering academia in 1974 as an assistant professor of psychiatry at the UCSD Medical School. In 1975, Dr. Schuckit was recruited as the first director of the Alcohol and Drug Abuse Research Institute at the University of Washington in Seattle. Since his return to San Diego in 1978, Dr. Schuckit has served on the faculty of the UCSD Medical School, where he is currently a Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, and as the Director of the Alcohol and Drug Treatment Program and the Alcohol Research Center at the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System. As a noted expert in the alcohol field, Dr. Schuckit served on the National Advisory Council on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism from 1979 to 1983 and again from 1992 to 1996. He also served as Council representative to the Advisory Committee to the director of the National Institutes of Health in 1996.
Dr. Schuckit continues to share his knowledge and expertise teaching medical students and residents at the UCSD Medical School. He also serves as Editor of the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs, and has been a member of the editorial boards of many major alcohol and drug journals in the United States and Europe. In addition, he is Director of the Alcohol Medical Scholars Program with the goal of encouraging junior faculty in medical schools to improve their teaching skills and develop careers in substance use disorders. From 1987 to 1989, he participated on the Alcohol Psychosocial Research Review Committee as a peer reviewer for alcoholism treatment research grant applications, and is currently serving on the Behavioral Genetics and Epidemiology Study Section at the Center for Scientific Review, NIH.
In addition to NIAAA’s Jack Mendelson Honorary Award, Dr. Schuckit has been the recipient of the NIAAA Keller Honorary Award, the Middleton Award for the best research within the VA system, the American Psychiatric Association's Hofheimer Prize (now the APA Award for Research), the Society for Biological Psychiatry’s Gold Medal Award for lifetime achievement, the Research Society on Alcoholism’s Distinguished Scientist and Seixas Awards, the James B. Isaacson Memorial Award and the Jellinek Award.