SYNERGY History

Alan I. Green, MD, the Raymond Sobel Professor of Psychiatry, who served as chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the Geisel School of Medicine and Dartmouth-Hitchcock for nearly 18 years, was the founder of the Dartmouth SYNERGY Translational Research Institute.  

An acclaimed teacher, clinician, and researcher, Green joined the faculty of then Dartmouth Medical School in 2002 as chair of the Department of Psychiatry. 

Green was also a member of the advisory board of Dartmouth’s Neuroscience Center—bringing together Dartmouth-Hitchcock, the Geisel School of Medicine, the Thayer School of Engineering, and Dartmouth College neuroscience experts to share clinical neuroscience, basic neuroscience, and cognitive neuroscience research. 

Prior to joining Dartmouth, Green was an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, directing the school’s Commonwealth Research Center (CRC) since its inception in 1987.  

In October 2013, Dr. Green and Dartmouth were awarded $18 million to create SYNERGY, a clinical and translational science institute that joined the National Institutes of Health’s Clinical and Translational Science Award (CTSA) program. With this funding, Dartmouth became the first institution in northern New England to join the CTSA consortium, an important network of 60 medical research institutions in 30 states and the District of Columbia. 

SYNERGY dramatically expanded Dartmouth’s capacity to conduct clinical and translational science, with a particular emphasis on translational research to improve health and healthcare delivery for people living in rural areas. 

After Dr. Green’s untimely death in 2020, we resolved to continue his legacy by returning a CTSA to Dartmouth. We are honored to continue the work of SYNERGY with this new award from NIH’s National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences.