Stephen Faraone

Stephen V. Faraone is an American psychologist. He has worked mainly on attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder and related disorders.

Education and career
Faraone graduated in 1978 from the State University of New York at Stony Brook with a BA in Psychology with highest honors. He then went to the University of Iowa where he obtained his master’s and Ph.D. degrees. Faraone completed a postdoctoral clinical psychology internship and a research fellowship at the Brown University Program in Medicine.

After completing his post-doctoral fellowship at Brown, Faraone came to the Harvard Department of Psychiatry where he began a career in psychiatric genetics. He first served as an instructor in 1985, and as an Assistant Professor in 1989. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1993 and Full Professor in 2002. In 2004 he moved to SUNY Upstate Medical University where he is now Professor of Psychiatry and of Neuroscience and Physiology. He is also Senior Scientific Advisor to the Research Program Pediatric Psychopharmacology at the Massachusetts General Hospital and a lecturer at Harvard Medical School. Faraone is principal investigator on several National Institutes of Health funded grants studying the nature and causes of mental disorders in childhood. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on the genetics of psychiatric disorders and has also made substantial contributions to research in psychopharmacology and research methodology.

Research
Faraone’s studies of the genetic epidemiology of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) focused on the establishing patterns of familial transmission in families ascertained through ADHD boys and girls with colleagues at the Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. His subsequent studies clarified the genetic heterogeneity of that disorder. He has shown that 1) ADHD with conduct or bipolar disorders is a genetically homogeneous subtype of ADHD;      and 2) major depression is a nonspecific expression of ADHD genotypes. He has also shown that the form of ADHD that persists into adolescence is highly heritable, making a suitable candidate for linkage analyses. He used genetic paradigms to provide evidence for the validity of diagnosing ADHD in adults and has used adult samples to confirm the putative association between ADHD and the DRD4 receptor gene and completed a meta-analysis to confirm the validity of the association across many studies.

Faraone obtained funding from the National Institute of Mental Health to chair yearly international meetings of researchers studying the molecular genetics of ADHD. The main goal of these meetings is to foster collaboration (and reduce unproductive competition) among researchers studying the genetics of ADHD.

One line of his research has focused on assessing the validity of the diagnosis of ADHD in adults, which has been a source of much controversy in the scientific and clinical literature about ADHD. His review of the literature supported idea that adult ADHD is a valid disorder and his meta-analysis of ADHD follow-up studies showed that about two-thirds of ADHD youth continue to have impairing symptoms of ADHD in adulthood. He has also addressed psychometric issues from several perspectives. In one paper he presented theoretical issues that suggest ADHD is not a developmentally sensitive diagnosis. In another he showed that having an ADHD child does not bias adults with ADHD to over-report ADHD symptoms. He has also shown that, from a genetic perspective, symptom reporting in adults with ADHD may be more valid than symptom reporting in children. He has also shown using patterns of inheritance, neuropsychological studies, studies of substance use disorders, and studies of personality traits, that the DSM-IV age at onset criterion is too strict and that ADHD may validly onset in adolescence.

Additional published work includes animal model studies of ADHD, family studies of ADHD,           candidate gene studies of ADHD,       meta-analyses of candidate gene studies,   linkage analyses of ADHD,   a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of ADHD  and a pharmacogenetic GWAS of methylphenidate response in ADHD. He has also published methodological papers,   and systematic reviews of the genetics of ADHD,   the neurobiology of ADHD  and environmental risk factors for ADHD.

Awards and honors
Faraone has authored over 550 journal articles, editorials, chapters, and books and was the eighth highest producer of High Impact Papers in Psychiatry from 1990 to 1999 as determined by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). In 2005, ISI determined him to be the second highest cited author in the area of ADHD and in 2007 he was the third most highly cited researcher in psychiatry for the preceding decade.

In 2002, Faraone was inducted into the CHADD Hall of Fame in recognition of outstanding achievement in medicine and education research on attention disorders. In 2004 and 2008 he was elected to the Vice Presidency of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics. In 2008, he received the SUNY Upstate President’s Award for Excellence and Leadership in Research.