We congratulate Dr. Antonio Pascual-Leone on the receipt of a Faculty Award for Excellence in Scholarship, Research and Creative Activity in the Mid-career category.
Dr. Pascual-Leone has been a faculty member in the Department of Psychology since 2005 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2010.
Dr. Pascual-Leone’s scholarly output is impressive. Over about a nine year period, he has published 23 peer reviewed articles, 10 book chapters, and co-authored a book (with another 8 items now under peer review). He has published in journals such as the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology (JCCP), Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS), Psychotherapy Research, Journal of Clinical Psychology, and Counselling and Psychotherapy Research. He now reviews papers for most of these journals, which is a testament to the esteem with which his work is held in the field. Of course, a scholar’s contributions are best assessed by examining the impact of individual contributions. His papers and book have been cited hundreds of times. In addition, he has given over 75 conference presentations, and is highly successful in obtaining external research funding and has obtained three SSHRC awards to date.
Dr. Pascual-Leone’s research is focussed in the areas of emotional processing and psychotherapy. In his work, he combines elegant theorizing with sophisticated research methods and diverse analytic methods. We also recognize another unique aspect of his research program. He regularly builds on his more basic research findings and incorporates them into the courses that he teaches, and then conducts research on the effectiveness of this teaching. In this manner, he brings the cycle of knowledge generation full circle – establishing findings in basic research, incorporating the findings into interventions and training, reflecting on their effectiveness, which then inspires new basic research questions. He exemplifies the ideal in training ‘highly qualified personnel’. Much of his work is immediately incorporated into training in clinical assessment and psychotherapy in the classroom. His research supervisees benefit tremendously from his attention. His commitment to students’ goes beyond the classroom to more direct research mentorship as well. A glance at his CV reveals 13 papers on which one or more of his students are co-authors.
Dr. Pascual-Leone has a well-established reputation within Canada and internationally. He is a leader within the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration. He has been invited to speak and to present numerous workshops. He has spent time at the University of British Columbia and the University of Zurich, Switzerland, as a visiting professor. For over 10 years he has been a training facilitator at the Emotion Focused Therapy Clinic, affiliated with York University. The quality of his work has been recognized by a number of external bodies. He received a Certificate of Excellence for his dissertation from the Canadian Psychological Association (2006). He was recognized for early career contributions by the Society for the Exploration of Psychotherapy Integration in 2009. He received an award for the best empirical research article from Division 29 (Psychotherapy) of the American Psychological Association in 2010. Most recently, he received an Outstanding Early Career Achievement Award from the Society for Psychotherapy Research (2014).
We extend our congratulations to our colleague and friend on this well-deserved recognition.