Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: It is an enormous pleasure for me to announce that Bruce N. Cuthbert is the recipient of our society's highest award, for Distinguished Contributions to Psychophysiology, and to have this opportunity to describe for you Bruce's impressive career in basic and translational science, and his groundbreaking national leadership in advancing the scientific study of mental disorder. I have some confidence in taking on this responsibility, as I've been fortunate to have a longtime association with Bruce. At the beginning, I served as his teacher and mentor, but then rapidly Bruce was a valued colleague, a confident and trusted advisor, and often my leader and guide in shared scientific work—overall, a much-valued friendship of almost 50 years. Bruce's subsequent graduate school career was stellar. He contributed importantly to many projects, culminating in a truly distinguished, multiple-experiment dissertation study evaluating biofeedback methodologies, which was published in the high-impact APA Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. His studies had taken place, however, during a difficult time for the United States and for our universities. Bruce's matriculation at the University of Wisconsin began shortly after the President and Congress committed our youth and treasure to the war in Vietnam (as we were recently reminded by the Ken Burns documentary on PBS) and, ironically, concluded with his graduate studies in this long war's troubled end. As for many students, Bruce was not untouched by these events. He was drafted after his first year in graduate school, spent 2 years in an Army laboratory, and returned to his studies supported by a U.S. Army program recruiting potential military officers. With his graduation in 1976, he reentered active military service. Subsequent to attending officers' school and the rigors of basic training, the newly minted second lieutenant was not sent to keep the peace in Asia, but fortuitously, based on his graduate record in basic science, Bruce was assigned to the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, MD. There, he broadened his research experience to include comparative psychology, directing a laboratory studying behavioral and autonomic reactions in animal subjects. Six years later, Captain Cuthbert resigned from active military service and came to the University of Florida for a delayed postdoctoral, clinical internship—which his graduate school military commitment had denied him—and to subsequently seek an academic position where he could do both clinical as well as basic research. Bruce stayed on at Florida, and his tenure there was remarkable! He joined the faculty of the Department of Clinical and Health Psychology, and during his 17 years at Florida, he published a host of first-authored papers and led multiple new, inventive projects in both basic science and translational research. With his technical acumen, he collaborated well with radiology engineers, and in the 1990s was in the first group initiating MRI research at the University of Florida. And it was Bruce Cuthbert, working with Margaret Bradley, who carried forward development of the International Affective Picture System, a research tool widely used by neuroscientists and psychophysiologists. Furthermore, Bruce's work as a scientist was recognized internationally, and during the Florida years he was several times abroad, as a guest professor in Sweden, and at the universities of Tübingen and Giessen in Germany. Ever active and productive, he also found time to greatly serve our Society. He was twice elected to the Board of Directors, served as program chair at the 1993 SPR meetings in Rottach-Egern, Germany, and was SPR president in 2003–2004. In addition to his impressive research accomplishments at Florida, he was codirector of the Anxiety Service, Behavioral Health Network, a university-wide program integrating assessment and treatment for psychological and psychiatric clinics; he served as research director of the University of Florida Fear and Anxiety Disorders Clinic, and was the associate director of our Regents Center for the Study of Psychophysiology. He is, indeed, a natural leader. In our conversations over the years, I recall Bruce frequently expressing concerns about science policy, as, for example, how funding announcements guided areas of study, selecting among many alternatives, determining—but often intruding, constraining—the directions of scientific inquiry. Thus, it was not a complete surprise when in 1998 he left the University of Florida, accepting an invitation from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) to be chief of their Emotional Processes Program in Bethesda, and subsequently going on to direct NIMH's main Adult Psychopathology & Prevention Branch from 1999 to 2005—and already a significant voice shaping science policy. Bruce's performance at NIMH was outstanding, and his preternatural administrative skills were highly respected by his colleagues at the agency. Bruce is, however, foremost a distinguished scientist, mentoring students, a person most happy in the lab designing experiments and exploring new data. Thus, in 2005, he was lured back to academia, accepting a professorship at the University of Minnesota, leading a Clinical Science and Psychopathology Research Program, and carrying forward in the lab his lifelong efforts to develop an objective psychophysiology of mental disorder. Five years later, however, NIMH called again and, fortunately for mental health research, Bruce responded. Back at the agency, he was soon in charge of a new Division of Adult Translational Research, working closely with the then director of the National Institute of Mental Health, Thomas Insel. In conversation with Insel over the next few years, Bruce elucidated the problems he saw in translating basic research into clinical practice: the need to remove the constraints on a science of diagnostic systems based wholly on patients' symptom reports. In this regard, I quote Dr. Insel's letter describing Bruce's leadership in bringing unfettered science to the mental health arena: “Dr. Cuthbert led an effort to change the process of diagnosis by introducing the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) project, a project designed to augment reports of symptoms with data from cognitive science, biological science, and social science.” “… a grand challenge to the mental health community to re-think diagnosis through big-data” … measuring brain, body, and behavior, seeking a more objective classification of mental disorder. “Whatever the ultimate success of this bold undertaking [continued Dr. Insel], there can be little doubt that Dr. Cuthbert has already transformed the field.” With Insel's departure from federal service for the private sector, Bruce became acting director of NIMH, the first psychophysiologist to ever lead the premier, world's largest agency for mental disorders, overseeing both its intramural and extramural divisions and all its many programs in basic and clinical science. In the long history of our society, SPR has been the birthplace of many new initiatives over the years—initiatives that then spawned new scientific societies, for example, in biofeedback, behavioral medicine, and cognitive neuroscience, to name a few. We have had, furthermore, many distinguished scientists who have importantly influenced the course of scientific inquiry in many fields. However, Cuthbert's transformative role is surely unique. His dramatic commandeering of mental health policy was not exactly a surprise, but certainly unpredicted. I can remember when Bruce first went to NIMH, my sometimes thoughts were: This is an outstanding scientist. Why has he foregone his incredible ability as a researcher in favor of an administrative future? How much wiser Bruce was! So what's Bruce like? As all who know him would say: He is a wonderful person—modest, truthful, helpful, brave—Scout's honor—no entrepreneurial guy seeking power and dominion but a truly dedicated public servant, socially adept, with a keen intelligence. Again, quoting Director Insel: “Dr. Cuthbert may not, at first, appear a typical revolutionary. But it is his quintessentially Mid-Western reasonableness that has, ironically, already transformed the field …” of research in mental health. In brief, based on his impressive performance as researcher and scientist, his profound contributions to science policy at the National Institute of Mental Health, and his current position of leadership in what has become a world effort to better understand and treat mental illness, Dr. Bruce N. Cuthbert richly deserves this, our highest award, for Distinguished Contributions to Psychophysiology. Go, Bruce! – Laudation Address: October 14, 2017, Zeremoniensaal, The Hofburg, Vienna, Austria
Source: Psychophysiology
DOI: 10.1111/psyp.13037
Author: Peter J. Lang
Institution: University of Florida
Language: English
Subfield: General Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2773287204