Robert Kolker, Author of "Hidden Valley Road"

Robert Kolker is the author of "Hidden Valley Road," a highly-ambitious, compassionate, and riveting work of intimate narrative nonfiction about an unforgettable family and their unexpected journey to an unprecedented scientific breakthrough.
In the spring of 2016, a friend introduced Robert Kolker to two sisters - Margaret Galvin Johnson and Lindsay Galvin Rauch. Both in their fifties, they were the youngest siblings and the only girls in a family of twelve children. Of their ten older brothers, six had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. The more Robert Kolker learned about the Galvin family, the less he could believe their story.
"Hidden Valley Road" offers a shadow history of the science of schizophrenia, rooted in a period where our understanding of mental illness was undergoing a seismic change. The Galvins lived through the era of institutionalization and shock therapy, the debates between psychotherapy versus medication, the needle-in-a-haystack search for genetic markers for the disease, and the profound disagreements about treatment, genetic prediction, and even prevention. With the incidence of schizophrenia and other mental illness in their home so prevalent as to be nearly unprecedented, the Galvins became one of the first families to be studied by the National Institute of Mental Health. Samples of their DNA helped form the cornerstone of genetic research into schizophrenia that continues today. And now, after nearly four decades of research, the Galvin family’s contribution is clear - by analyzing the family’s genetic makeup and comparing it with genetic samples from the general population, researchers are on the cusp of making significant advances in treatment, prediction, and even prevention of the disease that may benefit the three-point two million Americans who live with schizophrenia today.
Robert Kolker is the New York Times bestselling author of Lost Girls, named one of the New York Times's 100 Notable Books and one of Publishers Weekly's Top Ten Books of 2013. As a journalist, his work has appeared in New York Magazine, Bloomberg Businessweek, The New York Times Magazine, Wired, GQ, O Magazine, and Men's Journal. He is a National Magazine Award finalist and a recipient of the 2011 Harry Frank Guggenheim Award for Excellence in Criminal Justice Reporting from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York.