Diane J. Willis, PhD, is recognized with this APA Citizen Psychologist Presidential Citation for her sustained leadership in enhancing behavioral health services for children in Native American communities and for being on the front lines of assuring health equity to underserved children and families throughout her career.
Willis has demonstrated longstanding public service which includes an appointment to the State of Oklahoma Indian Affairs Commission Task Force to evaluate and coordinate services to Indian children and youth. She developed child psychology clinics within the Indian Health Service and tribal programs, and has been a consultant to the federal Head Start program and Zero to Three in early childhood education and mental health programs for Native American tribes. Similarly, she has served as core faculty with Project Making Medicine, training behavioral health professionals in Indian Health Service and tribal programs in child physical and sexual abuse.
Because of her frustration at the lack of services and providers available to treat poor and abused children in Oklahoma, she and a colleague appealed to the medical director of the State Department of Health and Human Services and Oklahoma became the first state in the United States to reimburse for psychological services under Medicaid.
When state budgetary concerns threatened the University of Oklahoma Children's Physicians - Child Study Center's existence, where Willis worked for 25 years, she became a powerful advocate for the Center in both the state legislature and at the University. She found that sharing research and clinical experiences with legislators (locally and nationally) is an important means of advocacy that can result in broad changes for disadvantaged children and families. For example, Willis, with an alliance of child-focused agencies, was able to influence state legislators to amend the Welfare Act to provide better early child care and prevent neglect from parents going to work without adequate child care.
At the national level, Willis has also testified to Congress as part of the Child Abuse Advisory Board. Successes like these fit well with her advice that psychologists be “civic-minded and politically active” in order to advocate for the needs of children and families.
She continues to lobby for more professionals to fill the great needs she sees in the Indian Health Service clinics. She has also been integral in establishing Early Head Start and Head Start programs of research and service for American Indian/Alaskan Native youth and families. Willis is currently advocating locally to establish better multidisciplinary assessment of American Indian youth in foster care as well.
Willis is a voting member of the Native American tribe known as Kiowa. She is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma and participated in a two-year postdoctoral internship in Clinical Child/Pediatric Psychology, University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center. Willis is currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center.
She has had a long and productive career that spans research, training and education, clinical care and advocacy. She has been an active fellow of APA for a number of years: serving as president for APA Divisions (12, 29, 37, 53, 54), on boards (e.g., Board of Professional Affairs, Policy and Planning Board, Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest), and committees (e.g. Committee on Ethnic Minority Affairs, Committee on APA and State Association Relations of APA). She has also been active in other psychological associations, including the Southwestern Psychological Assn, Oklahoma State Psychological Association, on the Board of Trustees of the Association for the Advancement of Psychology, among others. She also has been president of the American Orthopsychiatric Association.