On 12 January 2017, Martin M. Katz, an Emeritus Fellow of ACNP, passed away in Rockville, MD, at age 89. He was elected as a member of the College in 1963, served as Vice-President in 1977, and edited Volume 10 of ACNP’s Oral History series. For his contributions to the College, he was awarded the ACNP’s 2016 Paul Hoch Distinguished Service Award.

Dr. Katz was born on 6 August 1927, in Brooklyn, received his AB in Chemistry from Brooklyn College, in 1949, and his PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Texas, in 1954. Three years later, he held the position of Executive Secretary of the First Psychopharmacology Advisory Committee of the National Institutes of Health, which was instrumental in establishing a Psychopharmacology Service Center (PSC). It was at the PSC that he developed the Katz Adjustment Scales.

In the mid-1950s, Katz set up a laboratory at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to study the effects of ‘psychedelic drugs,’ developed a ‘video-methodology’ for the study of psychopathology in psychopharmacology, and explored the effect of culture on the manifestations of psychiatric disorders. Then, in 1968, he was appointed Chief of the new Clinical Research Branch (CRB) of the Institute with the mission to stimulate research on the causes and treatment of schizophrenia and affective disorders. A key event during his tenure at CRB, and a turning point in his research, was the 1969 Williamsburg Conference that highlighted neurochemical theories about the pathogenesis of depression and brought to attention that progress in depression research would require the identification of better clinical end points and the development of suitable clinical methodology for testing relevant biochemical hypotheses. Launching soon after, a Collaborative Program on the Psychobiology of Depression laid the groundwork for large-scale testing of the biochemical hypotheses about the genesis of depression. Dr. Katz’s leadership of CRB was recognized by the Administrator’s Award for Meritorius Achievement, Drug Abuse and Mental Health and Human Services, US Government, in 1979.

In the mid-1980s, Dr. Katz joined academia, first as Chief of the Division of Psychology, then as Director of Experimental Psychopathology and professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Montefiore Medical Center (1984–1994). During this period, he was also the Principal Investigator for NIMH funded research on the Psychobiology of Depression. He continued with his research well into the second decade of the twenty-first century at the University of Texas Health Sciences Center in San Antonio.

Dr. Katz’s contributions are crowned with the publication of two monographs in the last three years of his life in which he shows that deconstructing the diagnosis of depression, uncovering its dimensional structure and developing a methodology that allows the measuring of drug-induced changes on the independent dimensions that comprise it could open up a new perspective in the clinical development of drugs for the treatment of depression (Katz, 2013, 2016).

Marty Katz is survived by his wife, Barbara Gelb Katz, two children, Nancy and Pete, and two grandchildren. He will be dearly missed by his family, friends, and the neuropsychopharmacology community at large.