George Aghajanian

George Aghajanian (born 14 April 1932 in Beirut, Lebanon) is Emeritus Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine [1]. He has been a pioneer in the area of neuropharmacology. He discovered the mechanisms by which LSD produces hallucinations and he has also uncovered how atypical antipsychotic drugs work. More recently, he and his colleagues found that ketamine, a rapidly-acting antidepressant drug, produces its therapeutic effects by stimulating the formation of new synaptic junctions, which normalizes neuronal transmission in prefrontal cortex. He graduated from Yale Medical School in 1958 and he joined the department of pharmacology in 1970.

References

• Yale School of Medicine faculty page
• "Notes on the Persistence of LSD in Humans" from Erowid