Dr. Sherry A. McKee, Professor of Psychiatry, has been appointed Deputy Director of Women’s Health Research at Yale.
WHRY Director Dr. Carolyn M. Mazure announced the appointment at a meeting of the Advisory Council on March 2.
“Dr. McKee has made significant contributions to women’s health research and everyone associated with our Center is delighted to have her as deputy director,” Mazure said. “In this new position, she will work directly with me to facilitate all of our initiatives. In particular, she will continue our commitment to building collaborations among scientists to generate useful new studies, and will oversee one of our newest initiatives — mentoring undergraduate students in research through our Center.”
In her professional career, Dr. McKee has made important contributions to our understanding of public health issues involving tobacco and alcohol dependence. She is recognized as a leading scientist in the areas of gender differences in addictive behaviors.
McKee earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Western Ontario before coming to Yale as a pre-doctoral fellow. Dr. McKee was mentored by our Director, Dr. Mazure, and the two scientists have collaborated on numerous studies on gender differences in addictive behaviors. Dr. McKee, in turn, has become an outstanding mentor to aspiring scientists.
She now is the Director of a National Institutes of Health-funded Specialized Center of Research, the Yale Translational Center to Develop Gender-Sensitive Treatment for Tobacco Dependence. This grant grew in part out of her WHRY-funded studies on gender differences in smoking behavior and smoking cessation. She is also Director of the Yale Behavioral Pharmacology Laboratory, and Research Director for the Yale Building Interdisciplinary Research Careers in Women’s Health (BIRCWH) junior faculty training program.
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