Awards

Member Research Award - Kelly Glazer Baron, PhD

Dr. Baron’s cross-sectional study utilized data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis to evaluate excessive daytime sleepiness using measures of self-report and the Epworth Sleepiness Scale. Dr. Baron is an instructor in the Department of Neurology at Northwestern University in Chicago. She is a member of the Building Interdisciplinary Research in Women’s Health Scholars program at Northwestern University, which is a career development program sponsored by the NIH/Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. She completed her PhD in Health Psychology at the University of Utah and a post-doctoral fellowship at Northwestern University. Her research has focused on CPAP adherence as well as treatment of sleep disordered breathing through psychological, behavioral and social interventions. In addition, Dr. Baron is the associate director of the comprehensive insomnia program at Northwestern where she focuses her clinical work on the evaluation and treatment of behavioral aspects of sleep disorders

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Student Member Research Award - Megan Ruiter

Megan recently completed her doctoral degree in the clinical health psychology program at the University of Alabama under the mentorship of Dr. Kenneth Lichstein. Currently, she is a two year post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Alabama at Birmingham that is focused on health services and outcomes research; the fellowship is supported by the Agency on Healthcare Research and Quality. Ms. Ruiter participated in a UCSD/VA Psychology Internship Program under the supervision of Sean P.A. Drummond, PhD, and also completed an SBSM-accredited Behavioral Sleep Medicine Training Program at the Alabama Neurology and Sleep Medicine Sleep Disorders Center. Her primary research interests are in behavioral sleep medicine, health psychology and the relationship between sleep, ethnicity, culture, memory, emotional decision making and anxiety. Megan’s meta-analysis determined the magnitude of ethnic differences between African Americans and Caucasian Americans in insomnia symptoms and sleep-disordered breathing, and also used moderator analyses to explore the variability in these effect sizes.

View Megan Ruiter's article

Friends of the Society

Frank Andrasik, PhD has served as an invaluable resource for the SBSM in its first year through his role as President of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT). Dr. Frank Andrasik served as President of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies in 2010, and in this role was an invaluable resource for the SBSM in its first two years. Dr. Andrasik welcomed an overture extended by the SBSM (then President, Michael Perlis and President-Elect, Christina McCrae) to explore how the ABCT might: 1) share information regarding society establishment and governance; 2) (in general) promote Behavioral Sleep Medicine within its ranks, 3) (in specific) assist the dissemination and implementation of CBT-I (see for example the June tBT column entitled "Sleep: the new frontier for ABCT"); and 4) augment BSM training within the ABCT and promote SBSM trainings to the membership of the ABCT. Towards these ends, Dr. Andrasik met with the SBSM leadership in 2010 and was regularly in contact via email and phone over the course of his tenure as president and (even more remarkable) since that time. These efforts bore many fruit, and it is likely that his initiatives have laid the foundation for a strong collaboration between the two societies for years to come.

Currently, Dr. Andrasik serves as a Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Memphis in Tennessee. Dr. Andrasik is clinically active and regularly serves as a consultant on behavioral medicine to various agencies.

Thomas Roth, PhD has championed the Society by leading our charitable program and serving as an invaluable advisor to the Board of Directors. He single-handedly approached numerous companies to become Founding Benefactors of this fledgling organization. In only two years, he has so far secured more than $30,000 in unrestricted industry support for the Society, which has helped fund programs and initiatives developed by our Board and committees. Dr. Roth is the founder of the Sleep Disorders and Research Center at the Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit where he has been the director since 1978. He is also a professor in the department of psychiatry at Wayne State University School of Medicine and serves as a clinical professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of Michigan. In 2002, he received the NSF’s Lifetime Achievement Award for his accomplishments and contributions to sleep science, sleep medicine, and public health. Dr. Roth’s research focuses on normal as well as pathological sleep processes. His work includes research on insomnia, epidemiology, sleep loss, sleep fragmentation, pharmacological processes and clinical trials, and sleep pathologies. Though Dr. Roth does not claim a focused interest in behavioral sleep medicine, he has never shied away from opportunities to advance any aspect of sleep science. The same dedication to the field of sleep medicine that moved him to be a pioneer and proponent in this field for many years, also inspired him to support the clinical and scientific ambitions of the Society of Behavioral Sleep Medicine.