Executive Committee

Philip Zimbardo, PhD

Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Stanford University

Philip Zimbardo was born in 1933 and grew up in the South Bronx ghetto of New York City in a poor, uneducated Sicilian-American family. From this experience he learned that people, not material possessions, are our most valuable resource, that diversity should be embraced because it enriches us, and that education is the key to escaping poverty. His education began in New York Public School 52 and later included Monroe High School (with classmate Stanley Milgram), Brooklyn College (published his first research article on race relations), and Yale University for his Ph.D. (in 1959). Dr. Zimbardo has been on the faculty at Yale, New York University, Columbia University, and Stanford University, where he has been a professor since 1968. Among his honorary degrees are those from Greece’s Aristotle University, Peru’s San Martin University, and the Pacific Graduate School of Psychology (in clinical psychology). For more than 40 years, Dr. Zimbardo has devoted his career to teaching, scientific research, the practice of psychology, and applying psychological knowledge to improve the human condition. Dr. Zimbardo has authored more than 250 articles, chapters, and books on topics that range from exploratory behavior in rats to persuasion, dissonance, hypnosis, cults, shyness, time perspective, deindividuation, prisons, and madness. His Stanford Prison Experiment is considered a classic demonstration of the power of situations to shape human behavior. At the APA convention in the August, 2000, he received the APA Division 1 Hilgard Award for his lifetime contributions to theory and research in general psychology.

Laura Roberts, MD

Chairman, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University
Professor, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University

Author/editor of 7 books and monographs and more than 225 articles in peer-reviewed journals and book chapters, Dr. Roberts is a nationally recognized scholar and leader in ethics, psychiatry, and medical education. Since 2003 she has served as the Editor-in-Chief of Academic Psychiatry—a journal focused on innovative education, mentorship, and leadership in academic psychiatry.

Dr. Roberts has performed numerous empirical studies of contemporary ethics issues in medicine, science, and health policy, including research on informed consent, ethical considerations in genetic inquiry, health care and clinical investigation involving members of vulnerable populations, death and dying, professionalism education, and related topics. Dr. Roberts’ research has been funded through competitive grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Energy as well as the National Alliance of Schizophrenia and Depression, the Arnold P. Gold Foundation, and other private foundations.

Dr. Roberts has been elected or appointed to several prominent leadership roles nationally, including president of the Association for Academic Psychiatry and president of the American Association of Chairs of Departments of Psychiatry. In 2008 she received the University of Toronto Centennial Award for Leading International Psychiatric Educator, and in 2010 she was given the Association for Academic Psychiatry Lifetime Achievement Award. With colleagues, she has recently written or edited several books, including Concise Guide to Ethics in Mental Health Care, Professionalism and Ethics: Q & A Self-Study Guide, Handbook of Career Development in Academic Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, The Book of Ethics: Expert Guidance for Professionals Who Treat Addiction and Clinical Psychiatry Essentials. She is presently working on International Handbook of Psychiatry: A Concise Guide for Medical Students, Residents, and Medical Practitioners.

Dr. Roberts joined the faculty of Stanford in September 2010. She previously was the Chairman and Charles E. Kubly Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin and Professor and Vice Chair for Administration in the Department of Psychiatry, the Jack and Donna Rust Professor of Biomedical Ethics, and the Founder and Director of the Institute of Ethics at the University of New Mexico. Dr. Roberts performed her undergraduate, graduate, and fellowship training at the University of Chicago and her residency training at the University of New Mexico.

Brian A. Wandell, PhD

Chairman, Department of Psychology, Stanford University
Professor of Psychology and Electrical Engineering, Stanford University

Brian A. Wandell is the first Isaac and Madeline Stein Family Professor. He joined the Stanford faculty in 1979 where he is Chair of Psychology and a member, by courtesy, of Electrical Engineering and Radiology. His research projects center on how we see, spanning topics from visual disorders, reading development in children, to digital imaging devices and algorithms.

He graduated from the University of Michigan in 1973 with a B.S. in mathematics and psychology. In 1977, he earned a Ph.D. in social science from the University of California at Irvine. After a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, he joined the faculty of Stanford University in 1979. Professor Wandell was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1984 and became a full professor in 1988. In 1986, Dr. Wandell won the Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences for his work in color vision. He was made a fellow of the Optical Society of America in 1990; in 1997 he became a McKnight Senior Investigator and received the Edridge Green Medal in Ophthalmology for work in visual neuroscience. In 2000, he was awarded the Macbeth Prize from the Inter-Society Color Council, and in 2007 he was named Electronic Imaging Scientist of the Year by the SPIE/IS&T, and he was awarded the Tillyer Prize from the Optical Society of America in 2008. Wandell was elected to the US National Academy of Sciences in 2003.

Gary K. Steinberg, MD, PhD

Director, Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences
Chairman, Department of Neurosurgery, Stanford University
Professor of Neurosurgery and the Neurosciences, Stanford University

Dr. Steinberg graduated summa cum laude with Honors in Biology from Yale University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was accepted into the Medical Scientist Training Program at Stanford University School of Medicine receiving his medical and doctoral degrees in neuroscience in 1980. He completed his surgical internship and residency in Neurological Surgery at Stanford. In 1987, Dr. Steinberg joined the faculty at Stanford as an Assistant Professor in Neurosurgery, being promoted to Associate Professor with tenure in 1993 and Professor in 1997. He was instrumental in forming the Stanford Stroke Center in 1991 and is currently the Co-Director. He was appointed Chairman of the Department of Neurosurgery at Stanford in 1995 and holds the Bernard and Ronni Lacroute-William Randolph Hearst Endowed Chair of Neurosurgery and the Neurosciences. Dr. Steinberg has also been a member of the Executive Committee of the Neuroscience Institute and of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford since their inceptions. He is currently the director for the Stanford Institute for Neuro-Innovation and Translational Neurosciences.

Brian Knutson, PhD

Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Stanford University

Brian Knutson is an assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Stanford University, and a CHP/PCOR associate. His research focuses on the neural basis of emotional experience and expression. He investigates this topic with a number of methods including self-report, measurement of nonverbal behavior, comparative ethology, psychopharmacology, and functional brain imaging. His long-term goal is to understand the neurochemical and neuroanatomical mechanisms responsible for emotional experience and to explore the implications of these findings for the assessment and treatment of clinical disorders of affect and addiction, as well as economic behavior.

Knutson has received Young Investigator Awards from the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, the Association for Behavioral Medicine Research, the American Psychiatric Association, and the New York Academy of Science. He received BA degrees in experimental psychology and comparative religion from Trinity University, a PhD in experimental psychology from Stanford, and has conducted postdoctoral research in affective neuroscience at UC-San Francisco and at the National Institutes of Health.