Hyman also stressed his commitment to undergraduate education at the College, echoing Summers’ inauguration statements about the importance of improving science education for all students—not just science concentrators.

“A curriculum can never be static.,” he said. “Knowledge is changing at an incredible rate.”

Hyman, 49, graduated summa cum laude from Yale University in 1974 in philosophy and the humanities. He was selected as a Mellon fellow and received a bachelors’s and a master’s degree in philosophy of science from the University of Cambridge in 1976.

From there, Hyman went to HMS, where he graduated cum laude in 1980. After an internship in medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), a residency in psychiatry at McLean Hospital and a clinical fellowship in neurology at MGH, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard in molecular biology.

Hyman went on to teach neurobiology at HMS and was the director of psychiatry research at MGH.

He left Harvard in 1996 to become the director of NIMH.

Currently, he serves on advisory boards internationally and is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences.

Hyman’s wife Barbara Bierer is a former HMS professor of pediatrics currently working at the National Institute of Health. They have three children.

—Staff writer Catherine E. Shoichet can be reached at shoichet@fas.harvard.edu.