J. John Mann is The Paul Janssen Professor of Translational Neuroscience (in Psychiatry and in Radiology) at Columbia University and Research Scientist, Psychopathology and Treatment Division at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He is a Past President of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and the International Academy of Suicide Research.

Dr. Mann was trained in Psychiatry and Internal Medicine and has a Doctorate in Neurochemistry. His research employs functional brain imaging, neurochemistry and molecular genomics to probe the causes of depression and suicide. Dr. Mann has published over 900 peer-reviewed papers and edited 11 books.

Dr. Mann is one of the leading experts on the neurobiology of mood disorders and suicidal behavior. Examples of his contributions include identifying autoreceptor overexpression as the major mechanism associated with impaired serotonergic function in depression and the target of action for SSRI antidepressants, identifying neurobiological deficits in the serotonergic and stress response systems underlying most deaths due to suicide, determining genetic and social determinants of health contributing to risk for suicide in the USA and overseas, using postmortem brain studies to identify the pathogenesis of suicide and mood disorders and pioneering applications of positron emission tomography and multimodal MRI to study the pathogenesis of mood and suicidal behavior in patients to build an array of biomarkers of risk and treatment monitoring.