Joseph Biederman

Joseph L. Biederman is Chief of the Clinical and Research Programs in Pediatric Psychopharmacology and Adult ADHD at the Massachusetts General Hospital, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Biederman is Board Certified in General and Child Psychiatry.

Biederman received the American Psychiatric Association’s Blanche Ittelson Award for Excellence in Child Psychiatric Research, the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry’s Charlotte Norbert Rieger Award for Scientific Achievement. He has been inducted into the Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (CHADD) "Hall of Fame."

Biederman was the recipient of the 1998 NAMI Exemplary Psychiatrist award. He was also selected by the Massachusetts Psychiatric Society Awards committee as the recipient of the 2007 Outstanding Psychiatrist Award for Research. In 2007, Biederman received the Excellence in Research Award from the New England Council of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. He was also awarded the Mentorship Award from the Department of Psychiatry at the Massachusetts General Hospital.

In 2008 Senator Chuck Grassley, Chairman of the Senate Finance Committee undertook a three year Congressional Investigation that found that Joseph Biederman, M.D., Timothy Wilens, M.D., and Thomas Spencer, M.D., well-known university psychiatrists, who had promoted psychoactive drugs, had violated federal, Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts General Hospital regulations by secretly receiving large sums of money from the pharmaceutical companies which made the drugs. Biederman and Wilens "were leading investigators and advocates for the diagnosis and treatment of bipolar disorder in children and adolescents." Biederman earned consulting fees of at least $1.6 million over eight years from pharmaceutical companies, but did not report much of this income to university officials. Johnson & Johnson gave more than $700,000 to a research center that was headed by Biederman from 2002 to 2005, and some of its research was about Risperdal, the company's antipsychotic drug. Biederman responded saying that the money did not influence him and that he did not promote a specific diagnosis or treatment. In 2011, Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School disciplined Biederman, Wilens and Spencer for violating conflict of interest polices but most of the allegations made against them were not substantiated. All retain their academic standing at Harvard.

In 2007, Biederman was ranked as the second highest producer of high-impact papers in psychiatry overall throughout the world with 235 papers cited a total of 7048 times over the past 10 years as determined by the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI). The same organization ranked Biederman at #1 in terms of total citations to his papers published on ADD/ADHD in the past decade.