Bonnie Awarded Yarmolinsky Medal By Institute of Medicine

Prof. Richard J. Bonnie

Richard J. Bonnie, the John S. Battle Professor of Law, and director of the Institute of Law, Psychiatry, and Public Policy, has been awarded the Adam Yarmolinsky Medal by the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine for his role as a valued adviser and contributor to the IOM for the past decade.

Bonnie has served on report committees, often as chair or vice chair, that studied nicotine dependence in children and adolescents, explored opportunities in drug abuse research and injury prevention and control, assessed the system for protection of human research participants, and evaluated the science base for tobacco harm reduction, among other projects. Currently he is chair of the Committee on Risk and Prevention of Elder Abuse and Neglect. He has served on the IOM Membership Committee and regularly provides advice to staff, reviews reports, and participates in annual meetings. The award is named for Adam Yarmolinsky, a charter member of the IOM and primary author of its charter and bylaws, and goes to an IOM member from a discipline outside the health and medical sciences.

In addition to his contributions to the IOM, Bonnie has served as an adviser to the American Psychiatric Association's Council on Psychiatry and Law since 1979, and received the association's Isaac Ray Award in 1998 for contributions to forensic psychiatry and the psychiatric aspects of jurisprudence. In 2001 he was selected as a "National Associate of the National Academies" for his "extraordinary service" to the IOM and National Research Council.

He served as a member of the National Advisory Council on Drug Abuse (1975-80) and from 1979-1985, he was chairman of Virginia's State Human Rights Committee, which is responsible for protecting the rights of residents and clients of Virginia's public mental health and mental retardation services system. Bonnie served from 1981-88 on the Advisory Board for the American Bar Association's Criminal Justice Mental Health Standards Project and from 1988-1996 on the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Mental Health and the Law. He is currently participating in the MacArthur Foundation's Initiative on Mandated Community Treatment.

Bonnie has been deeply interested in issues involving psychiatry and human rights. In 1989 he was a member of the U.S. Department of State delegation that assessed changes in the Soviet Union relating to political abuse of psychiatry and performed a similar mission for the World Psychiatric Association in 1991. In 1993 he became a member of the Advisory Board of the Network of Reformers in Psychiatry in Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, and in 1995 he became a member of the Board of Directors of the Geneva Initiative on Psychiatry. He joined the Law School faculty in 1973.