NPA is honored and delighted to congratulate Past-President and Legislative Chair Dr. Will Spaulding who was awarded the Kraepelin-Alzheimer Medal in Germany on September 27, 2014 where he was an invited speaker at a symposium on schizophrenia. The award cites Spaulding’s “excellent research on treatment and rehabilitation of schizophrenia”.
Dr. Spaulding is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Nebraska where he teaches graduate courses on psychopathology, psychopharmacology and the history and philosophy of psychology, and supervises clinical practica. He maintains an active clinical and consulting practice, including staff positions in community-based and hospital-based psychiatric rehabilitation programs.
Dr. Spaulding received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1976 and completed a postdoctoral Fellowship in Mental Health Research and Teaching at the University of Rochester, 1976-1979. He joined the UN-L faculty in 1979. His research interests address various aspects of schizophrenia and other severe disorders, including clinical and experimental psychopathology, the effectiveness of treatment and rehabilitation, and service systems and social policy.
Recent projects in his research group have included neuropsychological impairment in schizophrenia, cognitive and neuropsychological predictors of success in treatment and rehabilitation, neuroendocrine aspects of schizophrenia, assessment of stress and coping in rehabilitation, social cognition in psychosis, the effectiveness of cognitive treatment, state hospital reform and involuntary treatment. His graduate students include individuals in the regular clinical Ph.D. track and clinical students in the M.L.S./Ph.D. track of the UNL Law-Psychology program. His law-psychology students are generally interested in law and social policy related to severe mental illness, and therapeutic jurisprudence (using the law for therapeutic purposes).
Dr. Spaulding also has general interests in psychopharmacology and the integration of psychopharmacological and psychological treatment. He teaches graduate courses on psychopathology, psychopharmacology and the history and philosophy of psychology, and supervises clinical practica. His recent book, Treatment and Rehabilitation of Severe Mental Illness, with co-authors Mary Sullivan and Jeffrey Poland, is a comprehensive integration of theory, research and practice principles.
Emil Kraepelin was a scientist and physician who is considered the father of modern psychiatry. He was the first to identify the disorder that came to be known as schizophrenia. More familiar to most is the name of Alois Alzheimer, Kraepelin’s departmental colleague, who described the brain disease that today bears his name. Kraepelin and Alzheimer presided over the dawn of modern brain research at the turn of the 20th century, in a department that included many names familiar to modern neuroscientists, including Franz Nissl, who developed microscopic techniques that made it possible to see within individual brain cells, and Frederic Lewy, who discovered the molecular basis of Parkinson’s and other brain diseases. The symposium at which Spaulding was awarded the Medal was held in the very building at the University of Munich where Kraepelin and his colleagues did their work.
