Howard Kurtzman, PhD, is presented with this Presidential Citation for his leadership and commitment to promoting psychological science, which has helped shape APA’s activity to mitigate and prevent climate change and its effects on health and mental health. Kurtzman staffed APA’s task forces on climate change and represented APA in writing a joint report with ecoAmerica.
The APA Task Force Report on Climate Change, Addressing the Climate Crisis: An Action Plan for Psychologists, released in February 2022, indicates that the discipline of psychology must strengthen its capacity to address climate change and collaborate with other fields and sectors for maximal impact. The joint report that APA and ecoAmerica released in November 2021, Mental Health and Our Changing Climate: Impact, Inequities, and Responses, noted that climate change is taking a significant toll on human mental health worldwide in addition to impacts on physical health.
Kurtzman recently retired as Senior Science Adviser in the APA Science Directorate. In his 15 years at APA, he served as Acting Executive Director of APA’s Science Directorate after being named deputy executive director in 2007. He has played a lead role in managing APA’s efforts to enhance the status of psychology as a STEM discipline, develop clinical practice guidelines, and promote psychology’s role in addressing climate change.
Kurtzman came to APA from the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), where he served as a program director overseeing grant funding for research in cognition. He was also active in initiatives, conferences, and publications for NIMH, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services on a broad array of topics within the behavioral and social sciences, ranging from gender and sexual orientation to self-report processes and data archiving.
Previously, Kurtzman was on the faculty of the psychology department at Cornell University, where he taught and conducted research in psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology, and he was the founding director of Cornell’s undergraduate cognitive studies program. For all of these contributions, it is my honor to present him with this Presidential Citation.