Stephan Heckers, MD, MSc, is stepping down from his role as chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the end of the academic year. He will continue to see patients, conduct research and lead the Vanderbilt Early Psychosis Program, an internationally recognized translational research program.
A national search, chaired by Dr. Dane Chetkovitch, the Margaret and John Warner Professor and Chair of the Department of Neurology, will be launched immediately to identify Heckers’ successor.
Heckers, who holds the William P. and Henry B. Test Chair in Schizophrenia Research and the Donald and Charlotte Test Clinical Directorship in Psychosis Programs, joined VUMC from Harvard Medical School in 2006 to become the department’s fourth chair. During his remarkable tenure, the department’s clinical, research and academic programs have grown to meet VUMC’s and the region’s increasing demand for mental health services.
Heckers is currently VUMC’s longest serving clinical department chair. He credits his longevity to the department’s culture and tradition of steady leadership, with each of the three previous chairs serving for periods of similar length.
“As department chair, you can devote yourself to all three missions: education, patient care, and research,” he said. “Psychiatry is one of the six required disciplines for medical school clerkships, so we are an important pillar for medical education.”
The Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, which will soon celebrate its 80th anniversary, provides inpatient and ambulatory care to children, adolescents and adults in the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Hospital (VPH) located on the Main Campus of VUMC. The neighboring Nashville Veterans Affairs Medical Center also serves as a training site for the department’s residents.
Under Hecker’s leadership, VPH’s inpatient admissions have grown to 4,400 in 2025, while the hospital has gained national recognition for outstanding care of acutely ill patients. The number of full-time faculty with primary appointments in the department has remained steady over the years at around 90 while the number of nonfaculty clinicians has increased significantly to help meet rising demand.
“I want to express my sincere appreciation to Dr. Heckers. Over two decades he has remarkably advanced the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences’ clinical, training and research missions. Through the pursuit of excellence across all areas, he has transformed the delivery of behavioral health services at VUMC in countless ways,” said Jeff Balser, MD, PhD, President and Chief Executive Officer of VUMC and Dean of Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.
In 2019, the bed capacity in VPH increased from 88 to 106 through the addition of the Charlotte and Donald Test Jr. Center. The center’s addition marked the first constructed inpatient expansion of VPH since it opened in 1985.
Key additions to the department’s clinical services have included the Vanderbilt Neuromodulation Program, which exceeded 4,000 procedures in fiscal year 2025; the Partial Hospital and Intensive Outpatient Programs; Emergency Psychiatry services in Vanderbilt University Hospital’s (VUH) Adult Emergency Department and the Psychiatric Assessment Service at VPH. The department also added Psychiatric Consultation services, including Transplant Psychiatry, which provides psychiatric evaluation of medically and surgically ill patients at VUH. Finally, outpatient services have grown to more than 68,000 visits in fiscal year 2025.
“Under the leadership of Dr. Heckers, the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences has steadily added new and innovative programs to benefit the patients we serve. Stephan’s contributions have been integral to our health system’s the growth and success,” said Jane Freedman, MD, Deputy Chief Executive Officer and Chief Health System Officer.
Heckers expanded the department’s academic mission by creating the Division of Psychology, and he secured approval for renaming the department, founded as the Department of Psychiatry in 1947, to the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences in 2016.
The department’s General Psychiatry residency program has grown from 32 to 40 positions since 2006. The department started a fast-track program for child and adolescent psychiatry and has added fully accredited fellowships in consultation liaison psychiatry, geriatric psychiatry, addiction psychiatry and addiction medicine. It also established accredited Clinical Psychology internship and fellowship programs, now with 10 trainees each year. Most recently, the department created an accredited fellowship for psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners.
Heckers has mentored dozens of trainees and junior faculty for careers in academic psychiatry, resulting in faculty recruited as department chairs at institutions including Northwestern University, University of Mississippi, University of Tennessee Health Science Center, University of North Carolina, and as a center director for the Munroe-Meyer Institute at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.
Internationally recognized for excellence in research, the department’s National Institutes of Health research portfolio ranking has risen from No. 46 in 2006 to No. 22 in 2022, while the department’s grants and contracts have grown from $6.7 million at the end of Heckers’ first year as chair to $23.1 million today.
Adept at securing philanthropic support, Heckers has greatly increased the department’s endowed funds while also increasing the number of endowed chairs to eight. Earlier this year, the department received an estate gift from the late Charlotte and Donald Test Jr. of Dallas that will provide transformational support for research on severe mental disease. The landmark bequest builds on the couple’s lifetime giving to establish the Henry and William Test Endowment Fund.
Of his many accomplishments, Heckers says he is most proud of raising the academic profile of psychiatry. “Vanderbilt now fully recognizes psychiatry as an important aspect of academic medicine. That recognition internally can then be used to attract support from donors,” he said.
Heckers is widely respected for his clinical expertise in treating patients with psychotic disorders, particularly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and has been an NIH-funded investigator since 1999. He has published 220 peer-reviewed publications and has been an invited lecturer at institutions around the world. His research has focused on the structure and function of the hippocampus, a brain region crucial for memory, in patients with psychotic disorders.
“For 35 years, I have studied the neural basis of psychiatric disorders. After 16 years at Harvard, I was attracted to Vanderbilt by the tremendous resources for brain imaging. Here I have been able to do what I was not able to do before: follow patients for many years, to see what brain changes predict what will happen to a person with a psychiatric disorder,” he said.
Heckers has served as the editor-in-chief of JAMA Psychiatry and as section editor of the “Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders” chapter in the latest edition of the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (DSM-5). He currently serves on several editorial boards and advisory committees of national and international organizations.
In 2018, Heckers was recognized by the National Alliance on Mental Illness with an Exemplary Psychiatrist Award, honoring exceptional contributions made to improve the lives of people living with mental health conditions. He is also the recipient of the Paul Hoch Award from the American Psychopathological Association and the Outstanding Translational Research Award from the Schizophrenia International Research Society.
