Born in New York City as the eldest child of Maxwell H. Kolodny and Selma B. Kolodny, he attended
Edgemont High School in Scarsdale, New York, and
Columbia University (B.A., 1965), where he studied with
Moses Hadas and
Susan Sontag, with whom he maintained a lifelong friendship. He then went on to
Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (M.D., 1969), where he co-founded the school's first course on
medical ethics in 1969 and studied with noted child psychiatrist E. James Anthony, who had trained under Piaget and Anna Freud. Kolodny did his internship and residency at
Harvard University (at what is now the Beth Israel-Deaconess Hospital) and a fellowship in Endocrinology and Metabolism at
Barnes Hospital in
St. Louis. As the first medical student to study with
William H. Masters and
Virginia E. Johnson at what was then called the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis in 1968–69 (subsequently renamed the Masters & Johnson Institute in December 1978), Kolodny returned to this research institution after his training in 1972 and eventually became Associate Director, Director of Training and Head of the Endocrine Research Section of the
Masters & Johnson Institute. His research focused primarily on the effects of drugs (both illicit and prescription) on sexual function, the effects of chronic illnesses such as diabetes, cancer, and hypertension on sexual well-being, and studies of process and outcome of sex therapy, as well as topics in infertility. With his colleague Joan Bauman, Ph.D., Kolodny also conducted research seeking to identify the biochemical components (short chain aliphatic fatty acids) in human vaginal secretions that serve as pheromones in other mammalian species Kolodny is Medical Director and Chairman of the Board of the
Behavioral Medicine Institute in
New Canaan, Connecticut. He has served as a member of the Board of Advocates of
Planned Parenthood for more than a quarter century. In 1983, he received the National Award from the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex in recognition of his distinguished career. He has been a visiting professor or guest lecturer at institutions such as The
Smithsonian, the
National Institutes of Health,
Massachusetts General Hospital, and the
UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute, and has conducted postgraduate medical education programs for tens of thousands of physicians and other health care professionals. Kolodny has been a featured guest on hundreds of national television shows, from
Good Morning America and the David Susskind Show to
Larry King Live, Nightline,
Crossfire, and the
MacNeil-Lehrer Report. In 1997, he joined the board of directors of
Advanced Viral Research Corporation, a biotechnology company specializing in peptide nucleic acids. ==Published works==