For distinguished contributions to psychophysiology: William G. Iacono

In 2008 the Senior Awards Committee of the Society for Psychophysiological Research selected William G. Iacono to receive SPR's highest honor, the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychophysiology. SPR does not give this award every year, reserving it for the very best scholars in psychophysiology. The range of Bill's interests and contributions is remarkable. His work spans adult and developmental psychopathology, substance abuse, psychiatric epidemiology, and behavior genetics; schizophrenia, mania, depression, and impulse-control disorders; normal personality, family studies, and legal issues; and a stunning range of measures and research strategies. His early track record and future potential were recognized by the Early Career Award from both the SPR and the American Psychological Association. Bill subsequently served as SPR president. Recently he received the singular honors of the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology and an NIH/NIDA MERIT award, reserved for only the very best and most productive health researchers. His scientific leadership is widely recognized internationally. Bill's productivity is reflected in numerous measures, including not only his∼350 publications (unprecedented in our field to my knowledge) but the nature and venues of those papers. Over three quarters are peer-reviewed data papers (an empirical record also unprecedented in our field to my knowledge). Furthermore, considering the four journals in which he has published most often (100 papers total), all are the very top venues in their areas (Psychophysiology, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, American Journal of Psychiatry, Archives of General Psychiatry). His publication record is of the highest quality as well as remarkable in quantity. Another hallmark of Bill's scholarly record is the breadth of the methods he uses and, often, improves. These include published work on eye tracking, heart rate, electrodermal activity, electroencephalogam (EEG) spectral measures, EEG time-frequency analysis, event-related brain potentials, eye-movement artifact removal from EEG, nailfold plexus visibility, computerized X-ray tomography, and structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging. He is the most diverse scientist I know. Of numerous prominent scientific findings of Bill's that have altered the research landscape internationally, I would like to highlight a few. Early in his career, beginning with a brief report in Lancet, Bill provided a compelling demonstration that the findings of psychopathology studies varied greatly as a function of the choice of the control group recruited. This is now such a fundamental, widely understood principle, so familiar to investigators in the field, that it is difficult to appreciate that it required someone to discover and make a convincing case for it. Bill was the one to do that. A second seminal contribution, again affecting the entire field and beyond, is his pioneering work with endophenotypes in psychopathology, an idea that Bill developed in the context of research on schizophrenia. His work in this area convinced him that studying adults with schizophrenia or their healthy relatives, most of whom would never get schizophrenia, would not allow us to understand the etiology of the disorder, because it was not possible to establish causation after the fact in individuals already afflicted with the disorder. To discover the underpinnings of this serious disorder, he recognized the need to take a developmental approach. Along these lines, he published some of the earliest work on endophenotypes, which represent manifestations of processes that can lead to disease but are not themselves symptoms of a disease. Endophenotypes can vary in how closely tied they are to genetic or environmental factors (and their interactions). Importantly, endophenotypes are not merely risk factors, predictive of later pathology, but essentially incomplete expressions of the disease process itself. Thus, an endophenotype can serve as a way station in the developmental course of a disease that is informative about interim stages and causal mechanisms. Discoveries arising from studies of endophenotypes serve at least two essential purposes. First, they can reveal a portion of the causal chain that produces disease. Second, they can reveal entry points into developmental processes that can serve as a basis for interventions aimed at preventing or ameliorating subsequent disease. Thus, Bill's pioneering work in both conceptualizing and concretizing endophenotype phenomena has played a central role in the emergence of new approaches to researching, identifying, and treating diverse forms of mental disorder. This impact extends well beyond the psychopathology literature, but his impact on psychopathology research alone should not be underestimated. This work has revolutionized large segments of the field. As with his early discovery regarding control groups, Bill's work on endophenotypes is now pervasive in the literature. A third area in which Bill has demonstrated exceptional leadership is eye-tracking deficits in schizophrenia. Early on, he was something of a rebel in a field that was initially very narrow. Over time, he had enormous impact in opening up this area to diverse approaches. Some years ago I was in the audience of a special National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) conference on eye-tracking methods in schizophrenia. This had long been a very contentious literature. In that meeting Bill essentially took on the rest of the research community single-handedly, articulating what he believed was known and what was needed, as various specialists pushed one or another dissenting point. The main challenge to his position was the claim that “opthalmologically informed” or “neuro-opthalmological” measures were needed, not the more straightforward measures on which his work relied. The state of that literature today is largely as he outlined it, in terms of what measures and phenomena are most important. A recent meta-analysis of the literature on eye tracking as an endophenotype for schizophrenia included coverage of over 900 studies. The analysis indeed supported the points Bill made at that meeting years ago, showing that robust replication and substantial effect sizes were evident for many types of measures, not just the few neuro-opthalmological measures that others in the area had been advocating as the only acceptable approach. The meta-analysis also showed that the neuro-opthalmological measures have yet to shed any special light on mechanisms of the deficit. As a final substantive area, representing another key example but by no means the final word on his seminal contributions, I would like to emphasize Bill's work in recent years on what are called externalizing disorders. He has helped to build Minnesota into the premier site for basic and integrative research on the relationship between genetic and environmental contributions to a broad range of psychopathology that encompasses impulse-control disorders, substance abuse, and related disorders. On the one hand, his data and his conceptualizations have been a major factor in persuading the field that genes make a far larger contribution than was realized. Indeed, as with his earlier work on control groups and eye tracking, Bill helped change the thinking in the field profoundly, again in ways that are now widely taken for granted. On the other hand, his work on the roles of genes and environments has also played an important role in showing that a purely genetic story is clearly inadequate as an account of psychopathology. Thus, even as his work has pushed the field to address genetics, it has also argued against naïve reductionism in understanding the role of biological factors in psychopathology. Bill and Matt McGue serve as co-directors of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research. This center has a variety of National Institutes of Health (NIH) grants that fund four separate twin studies and an adoption study, all focused on preadolescent and adolescent children, all using longitudinal, prospective designs with epidemiological samples drawn broadly from the entire state of Minnesota. This project has close to 10,000 participants, 7,500 of whom have undergone a 2.5-h psychophysiology assessment, some as many as five times as they have grown up. It has produced over 165 publications and contributed substantially to the career development of many junior scientists Bill has mentored. He has noted that nothing he learned in grad school prepared him for managing such a project. But he is not slowing down. He is principal investigator (PI) or co-PI on eight current NIH grants and is looking forward to harvesting many more discoveries from the Center's huge and still growing database. Bill's contributions reach well beyond the research literature. He has been an extraordinary mentor, with 20 former students active in academia. This is especially impressive in clinical psychology, because the vast majority of Ph.D.s in our field go into clinical practice and conduct no research after completion of their degree. Three people he trained have received the SPR Early Career Award, one has received the early career award from APA, one holds the Distinguished Hathaway Professorship Chair at Minnesota, and one has been elected president of the SPR. On top of this record of research and mentoring, Bill has served science and society tirelessly. He has played a host of critical roles in SPR, as president, as an associate editor of Psychophysiology, as chair of six different committees, and as a wise voice at many moments I have witnessed. He has reviewed for at least 68 different journals, has been member or chair of 27 NIH grant-review committees, and has been asked to serve as an expert witness in dozens of court cases. He is unquestionably the leading scientist internationally on the use and abuse of “lie detection” methods, which have major consequences for civil liberties, public policy, and national security. I know of no one else who combines his substantive scientific record and his service record. Bill's professional career trajectory provides no hint of his earliest years. He was born in Germany of German parents, was then a World War II refugee, and was adopted from an orphanage by the Iacono family. He began learning English around age 1, moved to the United States at age 4, became a U.S. citizen at age 5, but lived in France from age 6 to 11. Bill has been back to Europe various times, including as a featured speaker at a meeting of the German Psychophysiology Society and as a guest professor at the University of Konstanz. As an undergrad at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Bill worked as a student affairs organizer, arranging rock concerts. In graduate school at the University of Minnesota, he worked with David Lykken, who later served as SPR president and subsequently received the Distinguished Contributions Award that Bill is now receiving. After graduate school, Bill earned tenure at the University of British Columbia in Canada, then settled back at Minnesota. Bill's impact on the clinical psychology training program at Minnesota is also notable, leading to a broader national impact. The Minnesota program has been widely regarded for decades as one of the nation's top Ph.D. programs in clinical psychology. For a variety of reasons, that stature was endangered until Bill reconceptualized and revitalized the program by grounding it thoroughly in biological phenomena centrally relevant to psychopathology. He worked to hire outstanding junior colleagues, mentored them, and helped them achieve international stature of their own. Many of his students and colleagues have spoken about the generosity of his mentoring and the key role it played in their career development. Under his leadership, Minnesota has again emerged as a premier clinical psychology program, serving not only as an exceptional source of graduates prized as faculty in other programs but as a cutting-edge training program identified by NIMH as a paradigm for the nation to follow. Bill secured an NIMH training grant to fund the program, an exceedingly rare accomplishment in our contemporary funding environment. He did so in part with the clarity and creativity of vision with which he redesigned the program. In 2009, it is easy to see that developing a strong biological theme in a clinical psychology program is a sensible move. Bill did it long before it was mainstream, and the program he rebuilt remains unique to this day. With this award, SPR recognizes not only the top-of-his-field quality and impact of Bill's work but the leadership he has provided time and again—in defining key questions to be asked, in inventing research methods for pursuing them, in revising the way we think about psychopathology and about biological phenomena that go awry in it, and in developing Minnesota's doctoral clinical training program into a national treasure. He has been doing this for over 30 years. The world has been catching up—in acknowledging a crucial role for genes in psychopathology (a profoundly unpopular view at the start of Bill's career—again, hard to imagine now), in adopting concepts and methods he pioneered, in accepting as standard knowledge findings and perspectives he first brought to the attention of the field, and in reconceptualizing doctoral training in clinical psychology to incorporate a core emphasis on neurobiological mechanisms and processes. Bill has been a pioneer, a builder, a mentor, a role model, a demonstration proof to so many people over the years. It is a great honor for the Society to have such a member, so deserving of the Distinguished Contributions Award.