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Myrna Milgram Weissman (b. 1940) is Diane Goldman Kemper Family Professor of Epidemiology in Psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, and Chair of the Department of Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. She is a clinical psychologist known for her research on the prevalence of psychological disorders and psychiatric epidemiology, as it pertains to rates and risks of anxiety and mood disorders across generations. Among her many influential works are longitudinal studies of the impact of parental depression on their children.

Weissman worked with Gerald Klerman in developing interpersonal psychotherapy as a short-term treatment for depression. They co-authored with Bruce Rounsaville and Eva Chevron the influential volume Interpersonal Psychotherapy of Depression: A Brief, Focused, Specific Strategy. Extending the approach to adolescents, Weissman co-authored the book Interpersonal Psychotherapy for Depressed Adolescents, with Laura Mufson, Kristen Pollack Dorta, and Donna Moreau. Other books co-authored by Weissman, including The Guide to Interpersonal Psychotherapy: Updated and Expanded Edition, offered further developments of their psychotherapeutic approach. Weissman and Klerman were jointly honored by the National Academy of Medicine in 1994 as recipients of the Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat International Prize in Mental Health. In 1996, they jointly received the Joseph Zubin Award established by the American Psychopathological Association for seminal contributions to psychopathology research.

Weissman has received numerous awards for her accomplishments including the Rema Lapouse Award for significant contributions to pediatric epidemiology in 1985, the Joseph Zubin Award for lifetime achievement from the Society for Research in Psychopathology in 1995, the Distinguished Service Award from the American Psychiatric Association in 2001, the Gold Medal Award from the Society of Biological Psychiatry in 2007, and the Thomas William Salmon Medal from the New York Academy of Medicine in 2009.

Biography
Weissman completed her Bachelors degree with honors at Brandeis University in 1956. She obtained a Masters in Social Work from the University of Pennsylvania in 1958, and subsequently worked as a psychiatric social worker in Chicago, IL, Glasgow, Scotland, and at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, MD. Weissman completed her PhD in Chronic Disease Epidemiology at the Yale University School of Medicine, in 1974, and subsequently joined the faculty of the Departments of Psychiatry and Epidemiology at Yale University of School of Medicine, where she remained until 1987. In 1987, Weissman became Chief of the Division of Clinical and Genetic Epidemiology at the New York State Psychiatry Institute and Professor of Epidemiology in Psychiatry at Columbia University.

Weissman had four children by her marriage to Sherman Weissman, including Jonathan Weissman. She was married to her research collaborator, Gerald Klerman for seven years until his death in 1992. She later married Nobel Prize laureate Marshall Nirenberg. After Nirenberg's death in 2010, Weissman assisted in submitting his papers to the National Library of Medicine.

Research
Weissman is widely regarded as an expert on clinical depression. Her early work, in collaboration with Gerald Klerman, focused on the efficacy of interpersonal therapy as treatment for major depression and other disorders. She developed keen interest in maternal depression and its impact on the development of child psychopathology. In collaborative work, Weissman studied mother-child pairs to determine the impact of maternal depression on children's mental health, and reported increased rates of psychiatric disorders among children of mothers who remained depressed following treatment. Weissman and her colleagues examined gender differences in rates of depression, posttraumatic stress disorder and other conditions, and examined genetic and psychosocial factors related to depression. Weissman led a cross-national study of the epidemiology of major depression and bipolar disorder, which documented many similarities in the diagnosis of depression and bipolar disorder across countries, including the United States, Canada, France, West Germany, Italy, Lebanon, Taiwan, Korea, and New Zealand.

Representative Publications

 * Robins, L. N., Helzer, J. E., Weissman, M. M., Orvaschel, H.,, Gruenberg, E., Burke, J. D., & Regier, D. A. (1984). Lifetime prevalence of specific psychiatric disorders in three sites. Archives of General Psychiatry, 41(10), 949-958.
 * Weissman, M. M., Bland, R. C., Canino, G. J., Faravelli, C., Greenwald, S., Hwu, H. G., ... & Lépine, J. P. (1996). Cross-national epidemiology of major depression and bipolar disorder. JAMA, 276(4), 293-299.
 * Weissman, M. M., & Klerman, G. L. (1977). Sex differences and the epidemiology of depression. Archives of General Psychiatry, 34(1), 98-111.
 * Weissman, M. M., Sholomskas, D., Pottenger, M., Prusoff, B. A., & Locke, B. Z. (1977). Assessing depressive symptoms in five psychiatric populations: a validation study. American Journal of Epidemiology, 106(3), 203-214.