The laboratory was established as a joint undertaking in 1981 between Nathan Kline Institute and New York State Psychiatric Institute. The analytical procedures we have developed have been of value in basic, translational, and clinical research studies in schizophrenia, bipolar illness, depression, addiction and suicide. Over the course of several decades the laboratory developed extensive expertise in clinical and animal studies of medications used in the in the treatment of all major psychiatric illnesses. In later years we have applied many of these techniques in the exploration of the effects and mode of action of drugs of abuse. More basic animal model studies of the molecular pharmacology of alcohol abuse, depression, alcoholism and fetal alcohol spectrum disorder have been developed in recent years.