Pulitzer-Winning Professor Dead at 74

John E. Mack, a Pulitzer Prize winning biographer and Cambridge psychiatrist who researched victims of alien encounters, died after being hit a by a car on Monday. He was 74.

Mack, who graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1955, was the author of 11 books, including his acclaimed biography of T.E. Lawrence—better known as Lawrence of Arabia—entitled A Prince of Our Disorder.

He founded the department of psychiatry at The Cambridge Hospital in the late 1960s and became a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School 1972.

Mack later founded The Cambridge Hospital’s Center for Psychology and Social Change—renamed the John Mack Institute two months ago—to explore “consciousness and transformation,” according to the group’s website.

Mack’s research focused on people who had gone through life-changing or traumatic experiences, including those he called “experiencers” of alien encounters.

Mack’s sister, Mary Lee Ingbar of Cambridge, Mass., said that her brother’s research demonstrated his fascination with how people respond to trauma that is hard for others to understand. “When you look at his career and all his interests, he was a person with great curiosity and great empathy, and a willingness to pursue the interests of his heart with unrelenting vigor.”

Colleagues in the John Mack Institute stated that through Mack’s clinical care of people who have survived disturbing events, he found his own sense of spiritual enrichment. Mack dedicated his last book Passport to the Cosmos, published in 1999, “To the experiencers, who have been my teachers.”

Harvard Medical School Professor of Neurobiology Edward A. Kravitz met Mack at the September 2003 Harvard Mind, Brain, Behavior Junior Symposium: “Schizophrenia, Dreams, and Alien Encounters.”

The symposium featured a screening of the film “Touched,” an independent documentary made about alien encounters at Mack’s request.

Kravitz described Mack as “a really lively, engaging and fascinating man. He was controversial, but highly intelligent, very articulate, and just plain fun to be with.”

Mack died Monday in London, England after he was struck by a driver as he was returning from the T. E. Lawrence Society Symposium at Oxford.

Mack received his undergraduate degree from Oberlin College in 1951. He served in the U.S. Air Force between 1959 and 1961.

In addition to his sister, Mack is survived by his ex-wife Sally Stahl; three sons—Daniel, of Boulder, Colo., Kenneth, of Almaty, Kazakhstan and Tony, of Cambridge; and two grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements have not yet been completed.