Jonathan Posner, MD
Dr. Jonathan Posner joined Vanderbilt in October 2026 as Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and System Psychiatrist-in-Chief. He came from Duke University, where he was Executive Vice Chair and JP Gibbons Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, having joined Duke in 2021 as Vice Chair for Research. Before Duke, he held an endowed professorship at Columbia University.
Dr. Posner is board certified in both adult and child and adolescent psychiatry. His clinical work focuses on ADHD and on mood and anxiety disorders in children, adolescents and young adults.
His research uses neuroimaging and artificial intelligence (AI) to understand how mental illness develops and to predict who is at risk, from fetal and infant brain development through adolescence. He is committed to developing the next generation of physician-scientists and has mentored many trainees and junior faculty to National Institutes of Health (NIH) career development awards and independent research careers.
Selected Publications
- Hill ED, Kashyap P, Raffanello E, Wang Y, Moffitt TE, Caspi A, Engelhard M, Posner J. Prediction of mental health risk in adolescents. Nature Medicine 2025; 31: 1840-1846.
- van Dijk MT, Talati A, Kashyap P, Desai K, Kelsall NC, Gameroff MJ, Aw N, Abraham E, Cullen B, Cha J, Anacker C, Weissman MM, Posner J. Dentate gyrus microstructure is associated with resilience after exposure to maternal stress across two human cohorts. Biological Psychiatry 2024; 95: 27-36.
- Bernanke J, Luna A, Chang L, Bruno E, Dworkin J, Posner J. Structural brain measures among children with and without ADHD in the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development Study cohort: a cross-sectional US population-based study. Lancet Psychiatry 2022; 9: 222-231.
- Posner J, Polanczyk GV, Sonuga-Barke E. Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. Lancet 2020; 395: 450-462.
- Posner J, Hellerstein DJ, Gat I, Mechling A, Klahr K, Wang Z, McGrath PJ, Stewart JW, Peterson BS. Antidepressants normalize the default mode network in patients with dysthymia. JAMA Psychiatry 2013; 70: 373-382.