He served as director of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) from 1988 to 1992, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego from 1977 to 2013, and as a vice president of the American Psychiatric Association.

[3] In 1970, Arnold J. Mandell, the founding chairman of the psychiatry department at the University of California, San Diego, recruited Judd.

It was while consulting on an outside program to help adolescents with drug problems that Judd met a social worker, Patricia Hoffman, whom he married.

As head of the NIMH, he worked with President George H. W. Bush to put in place the Decade of the Brain, a designation given to the 1990s by Bush in a collaborative effort between the Library of Congress and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to "enhance public awareness of the benefits to be derived from brain research".

"We will celebrate his incredible contributions," Grant said, "not just to our Department, School, and University, but to the field of Mental Health internationally.