Dr. Jack Mendelson’s decades-long preeminent research career was instrumental in establishing the view of alcohol use disorders as medical problems and in laying the  foundation for multidisciplinary research to understand, prevent and treat them.  After graduating from Johns Hopkins University in 1951, Dr. Mendelson earned his medical degree from the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1955.  He then served his medical internship at Boston City Hospital and his residency in psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital.  It was during his internship that Dr. Mendelson began researching the causes of alcohol dependence.  His empathy for alcoholic and addicted patients during these years led to his extraordinary research career studying the biological, behavioral, and clinical aspects of alcohol and drug use disorders.  From 1966 to 1970, Dr. Mendelson was chief of the National Center for Prevention and Control of Alcoholism within the National Institute of Mental Health.  This Center was the first federal program to focus on alcohol research, and was the predecessor to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) of the National Institutes of Health.  In 1970, Dr. Mendelson became Chief of the Department of Psychiatry at Boston City Hospital and Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.  From 1973 until his death in 2007, Dr. Mendelson was the Director of the Alcohol & Drug Abuse Research Center at McLean Hospital in Belmont, MA. 

Dr. Mendelson was an outstanding scientist and published almost 500 articles and books in the areas of clinical and basic research.  His studies have included the now classic experiments on human alcohol self-administration using participants on research wards, clinical observations, and animal studies that paralleled his human research.  His research approaches included self-report by subjects, brain imaging, observations of behavior, and endocrine functioning among others.  He served as Editor of the Journal of Alcohol Studies (1984 – 1991) and was on the editorial boards of many leading scientific journals in substance abuse and psychiatry.  He also received numerous honors and awards, including the American Psychiatric Association’s Hofheimer Prize (now the APA Award for Research), and two prestigious awards from the alcohol field, the Jellinek Memorial Award for Research on Alcoholism and the Research Society on Alcoholism’s Distinguished Research Award.  In addition to his many research accomplishments, he also mentored and inspired young investigators who have become leaders in alcohol and drug abuse research.

As a tribute to his remarkable scientific contributions to the field of alcohol research, NIAAA has established the Jack Mendelson Honorary Lecture series.  The purpose of this honorary lecture series is to highlight clinical/human research in the alcohol field by featuring an outstanding investigator who has made significant and long-term contributions to our understanding of alcoholism susceptibility, alcohol’s effects on the brain and other organs, and the prevention and treatment of alcohol use disorders.  NIAAA is pleased to present this series of scientific lectures to acknowledge the advances that are being made in a wide range of alcohol-related areas of clinical research, and to honor the memory of an individual whose exciting and pioneering research in human alcoholics remains relevant today.