ST. LOUIS —George Grossberg, M.D., is a recipient of the 2023 International Psychogeriatric Association’s (IPA) Distinguished Service to the Field of Psychogeriatrics Award.  

Grossberg, the inaugural Henry & Amelia Nasrallah Endowed Professor and Director of Geriatric Psychiatry at Saint Louis University, was also honored in 2019 for distinguished service to the IPA. For more than 30 years, the IPA has been a leader in the field of older adult mental health. The awards recognize exemplary professionals who have devoted their leadership and efforts to serving the organization and field.

Grossberg has been a leader in developing mental health programs, treatment and research in geriatrics. He was one of a handful of people to petition the American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology to officially establish the field of geriatric psychiatry as a subspecialization in psychiatry and to provide a means of identifying properly trained and experienced geriatric psychiatrists.

Grossberg specializes in Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias, late-life depression, delirium, psychiatry in the nursing home setting, and geriatric psychopharmacology. 

Past research includes a multi-center Phase II/III clinical trial that tested the safety and efficacy of an investigational drug’s ability to slow the decline of brain function and possibly delay or prevent Alzheimer’s disease in those at risk for Alzheimer’s disease who do not yet have symptoms of the illness.

“This is the new trend: to try to catch it as early as possible and provide intervention,” he told St. Louis Magazine. “One of the things we’ve learned isn’t so much that we had the wrong medications but that we had the wrong targets. We intervened too late.”