Michael Terman

Michael Terman, PhD, is an American psychologist best known for his work in applying the biological principles of the circadian timing system to psychiatric treatments for depression and sleep disorders. This subspecialty is known as Chronotherapeutics.

Terman received an AB from Columbia College in 1964, and a ScM (1966) and PhD (1968) from Brown University in the field of physiological psychology. From 1969 to 1981, he served on the psychology faculties of Brown and Northeastern Universities. He then moved to Columbia, where he is a Professor of Clinical Psychology in Psychiatry, with a joint appointment as a Research Scientist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He established the Clinical Chronobiology research program there in 1983 with funding from the National Institute of Mental Health. In 2004, the program evolved into the first hospital-based chronotherapeutics outpatient clinic in the United States, the Center for Light Treatment and Biological Rhythms at Columbia University Medical Center. In 1994, in parallel with his academic pursuits, he founded the Center for Environmental Therapeutics (CET), an independent, nonprofit international consortium of specialists in circadian biology, psychiatry and ophthalmology that provides chronotherapeutics education to both the lay public and clinicians. He serves as President of CET.

Before turning to clinical research, Terman’s laboratory work focused on the effects of light-dark exposure and timing of food ingestion on circadian rhythm organization in animals. The hypothalamic internal “master” clock in the suprachiasmatic nuclei had recently been discovered, with a primary function of programming daily cycles of physiology and behavior even in the absence of day-night cues. In animals lacking the clock nuclei, they showed that circadian rhythms of visual sensitivity and anticipatory behavior for scheduled meals persisted, even though unrestricted feeding and drinking behavior became arrhythmic. This work contributed to the conception of “peripheral” internal clocks (e.g., in the retina and liver) that operate in a coordinated multiple-clock system. With Swiss colleagues Charlotte Remé and Anna Wirz-Justice, he published the 1991 empirical and theoretical synthesis, The Visual Input Stage of the Circadian Timing System.

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