Jonathan Otis Cole was an American psychiatrist and the former chief of psychopharmacology at McLean Hospital.
He was considered to be the “father of clinical psychopharmacology in the United States [...] internationally known for his breakthrough research on the use of drugs to treat psychiatric illnesses.”[1] The Cole Resource Center at McLean Hospital is named in his honor and he was the founder of the Manic-Depressive & Depressive Association (MDDA)-Boston.
[1][2] Cole, the first director of the psychopharmacology research branch at the National Institute of Mental Health, died May 26, 2009, due to renal disease complications in Boston.
[1] Cole was head of the NIMH Psychopharmacology Service Center for a decade where he “mounted a national collaborative evaluation of the efficacy of new drugs... (which) provided a prototype, a model for subsequent NIMH collaborative evaluations of the new classes of drugs: lithium as a treatment for mania, tricyclic antidepressants for depression, and the benzodiazepines for anxiety disorders.
[1][3] Cole was a founder and one of the early Presidents of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ACNP) and in 1965, receiving their first Paul Hoch Distinguished Service Award.