Joshua Gordon

In September 2016, Joshua Gordon joined the NIH as Director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). For Gordon, who was previously a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at Columbia University Medical Center, this role presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to oversee a US$1.5 billion budget and shape the future of mental health research. When he started, he said his first order of business would be to listen and learn. One year on, he has heard a lot about the institute's classification of mental illnesses for research purposes (known as RDoC), the appropriate balance between basic and clinical research, and the challenges of using genetics to understand psychiatric disease, he told Asher Mullard.