Meet the People of the Irsay

Biography

Stephen Hinshaw is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Department Chair from 2004-2011. He is also Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. He received his B.A. from Harvard (summa cum laude) and, after directing school programs and residential summer camps, his doctorate in clinical psychology from UCLA, before performing a post-doctoral fellowship at the Langley Porter Institute of UC San Francisco.

His work focuses on developmental psychopathology, clinical interventions with children and adolescents (particularly mechanisms underlying therapeutic change), and mental illness stigma. He has directed research programs and conducted clinical trials and longitudinal studies for boys and—more recently—for girls with inattention and impulse-control problems (who often express many comorbid disorders), having received over $20 million in NIH funding and an equal amount in foundation funding. He has been Principal Investigator of the Berkeley site for the Multimodal Treatment Study of Children with ADHD (MTA) since 1992. He is co-director of the UCSF-UC Berkeley Schwab Dyslexia and Cognitive Diversity Center, and he directs the UCLA -UC Berkeley Awareness and Hope (stigma reduction) component of the UCLA Depression Grand Challenge. He is also co-director of the Child Teen and Family Center at the UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences.

Hinshaw has authored over 400 articles, chapters. and commentaries (h-index, Google Scholar = 127), plus 13 books, including The Mark of Shame: Stigma of Mental Illness and an Agenda for Change (Oxford, 2007), The Triple Bind: Saving our Teenage Girls from Today’s Pressures (Random House, 2009), and (with R. Scheffler) The ADHD Explosion: Myths, Medications, Money, and Today’s Push for Performance (Oxford, 2014). His book with St. Martin’s Press — Another Kind of Madness: A Journey through the Stigma and Hope of Mental Illness — was released in 2017. It was selected as Best Book (2018) in the category of autobiography/memoir from the American BookFest. Overall, he was one of the 10 most productive scholars in the field of clinical psychology across the past decade.

From 2009-2014 he was editor of Psychological Bulletin, the most cited journal in general psychology. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the American Psychological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Hinshaw received a Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Berkeley’s Division of Social Sciences in 2001. He also received the 2020 Phi Beta Kappa of Northern California Excellence in Teaching Award--and the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award from Ca's Department of Psychology in 2022. His Teaching Company (‘Great Lecture’) series, “Origins of the Human Mind,” was released in 2010.

His research efforts have been recognized by the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology (2015), the James McKeen Cattell Award from the Association for Psychological Science (2016)—its highest award, for a lifetime of outstanding contributions to applied psychological research—the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from the Society for Research in Child Development (2017), and the Ruane Prize for Outsanding Achievement in Chid and Adolescent Psychiatric Research, from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (2019). He is also the recipient of the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award (2020) and the Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health, from the National Academy of Medicine (2020). These awards reveal the breadth and depth of his research efforts; he is the only individual ever to have been awarded all six. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.

He has been featured regularly in the media, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Today Show, CBS Evening News, ABC World News Tonight, CNN, network nightly news, and many more.