Maurizio Fava, M.D.
Executive Director, MGH CTNI
Director, Division of Clinical Research of the MGH Research Institute
Chief, Department of Psychiatry, MGH
Associate Dean for Clinical & Translational Research, Harvard Medical School
Slater Family Professor of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Dr. Maurizio Fava is Director, Division of Clinical Research of the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) Research Institute, Chief of the MGH Department of Psychiatry and Executive Director of the MGH Clinical Trials Network and Institute, and Associate Dean for Clinical and Translational Research and the Slater Family Professor of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School.
Dr. Fava is a world leader in the field of depression. He has authored or co-authored more than 800 original articles published in medical journals with international circulation, edited eight books, and published more than 50 chapters and over 500 abstracts. The citation impact of Dr. Fava’s work is extremely high, as his articles have been cited more than 55,000 times in the literature, with an h index of over 115.
Dr. Fava obtained his medical degree from the University of Padova School of Medicine and completed residency training in endocrinology at the same university. He then moved to the United States and completed residency training in psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital. He founded and was Director of the hospital’s Depression Clinical and Research Program from 1990 until 2014. In 2007, he also founded and is now the Executive Director of the MGH Psychiatry Clinical Trials Network and Institute (CTNI), the first academic CRO specialized in the planning and coordination of multi-center clinical trials in psychiatry.
Under Dr. Fava’s direction, the Depression Clinical and Research Program became one of the most highly regarded depression programs in the country, a model for academic programs that link, in a bi-directional fashion, clinical and research work.
Dr. Fava has been successful in obtaining funding as principal or co-principal investigator from both the National Institutes of Health and other sources for a total of more than $95,000,000. Dr. Fava’s prominence in the field is reflected in his role as the co-principal investigator of STAR*D, the largest research study ever conducted in the area of depression, and of the RAPID Network, the NIMH-funded series of studies of novel, rapidly-acting antidepressant therapies.
Dr. Fava has received several awards during his career and is on the editorial board of five international medical journals. Since 1990, Dr. Fava has also mentored more than 50 trainees who have gone on to become lead investigators in the area of psychiatry. He has developed with Dr. David Schoenfeld a novel design (with over five patents) to address the problem of excessive placebo response in drug trials and to markedly reduce sample size requirements for these trials. In 2009, Dr. Fava received the A. Clifford Barger Excellence in Mentoring Award from Harvard Medical School, and in 2013 the John T. Potts, Jr., MD Faculty Mentoring Award from Massachusetts General Hospital.
Dr. Fava is a well-known national and international lecturer, having given more than 300 presentations at national and international meetings.
