Dr. Joseph Flaherty is the dean of medicine and a professor of psychiatry and community health sciences at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. Over the last 15 years, Dr. Flaherty has examined the effects of gender on the development of symptoms and illness, as well as health-seeking behavior and treatments in alcoholism and depression. He also has been involved in psychometric testing of new instruments and their cross-cultural adaptation through research conducted in Peru, Panama, Israel and the former Soviet Union. For more than 20 years, his research has been continuously funded by branches of National Institutes of Health (NIH), including the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), as well as the MacArthur Foundation, the Reynolds Foundation, the Chicago Community Trust, and other governmental and private agencies.

He is currently involved in a large-sample longitudinal study of the effects of occupational stressors on heavy drinking. Working with the Illinois Department of Child and Family Services, he is also developing models of health care delivery for high-risk children in state care, with the aim of early intervention and prevention. He is a consultant on three NIMH grants testing intervention models to decrease pre-teen use of illicit substances and early sexual encounters to prevent HIV. He has been the principal investigator on a large NIH Research Infrastructure Support grant to promote mental health service research on school campuses.

Dr. Flaherty has published more than 200 professional papers, books and chapters. He is an editorial member or reviewer for a variety of professional journals, and serves as a consultant for a number of international agencies, including the World Health Organization and the Falk Institute in Jerusalem.

Dr. Flaherty received his medical training at University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC), where he also completed his internship in pediatrics and his residency in psychiatry. He had additional research training in social psychiatry at UIC and in sociology at London University in England.