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Home > Public Resources > Trauma Blog > 2002 - Winter > ISTSS Honors Pynoos for Lifetime Achievement; Bryant, Holman, Munroe Also Win Awards at Meeting

ISTSS Honors Pynoos for Lifetime Achievement; Bryant, Holman, Munroe Also Win Awards at Meeting

ISTSS

January 1, 2002

 

Winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award, Robert S. Pynoos.
 

ISTSS presented its highest honor, the Lifetime Achievement Award, to Robert S. Pynoos for significant contributions to understanding the impact of children's exposure to violence, and to elevating the standards of mental health care for child victims and witnesses. ISTSS awards were presented at the 17th annual meeting's Friendship and Recognition Dinner.

During the past two decades, Pynoos has made significant contributions to understanding the impact of children's exposure to violence, and to elevating the standards of mental health care for child victims and witnesses. He has written extensively on child development and child traumatic stress, the neurobiology of child and adolescent trauma, and public mental health approaches for children and families after disaster, war and community violence. He has edited several widely respected books on posttraumatic stress in children and adolescents. He currently is conducting several major school-based projects using specialized trauma-grief focused protocols for high-risk children and adolescents.

 

Pynoos is a professor at UCLA's Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences and is the co-director of the recently established National Center for Child Traumatic Stress. Pynoos also is the director of the UCLA Trauma Psychiatry Service and the executive director of the UCLA Anxiety Disorders Section.


Richard Bryant, winner of the Robert S. Laufer Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement.
 

The Robert S. Laufer Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement went to Richard Bryant. This award is given to an individual or group that has made an outstanding contribution to research in the PTSD field.With more than 100 published articles in the areas of trauma, hypnosis and dissociation to his credit, Bryant also has written an authoritative text on acute stress disorder and has received multiple grants for his work on trauma and posttraumatic stress disorder. He has conducted extensive research in the area of acute stress disorder, developed assessment tools for identifying acute stress disorder, and conducted the first treatment studies of acute stress disorder.

Bryant is associate professor of psychology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and director of the PTSD Unit, Westmead Hospital, Australia.

Ellen Alison Holman was recipient of the Chaim Danieli Young Professional Award, which recognizes excellence of an individual who has completed training within the past five years in service or research within the field of traumatic stress.


Ellen Alison Holman, recipient of the Chaim Danieli Young Professional Award.
 

Holman is an associate researcher in the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, and a certified nurse practitioner. While at UC Irvine, she won the prestigious campus-wide Lauds and Laurels Outstanding Graduate Student Award in 1995. She also received the Martha Newkirk Award for Excellence in Graduate Student Research from the School of Social Ecology for her dissertation research on coping with the Southern California firestorms. In 1992, she received the Outstanding Graduate Student Achievement Award for Research in Victimology from the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers for her research on resilience in survivors of incest.

Holman studies how individuals cope with a variety of stressful life experiences, including childhood sexual abuse, war, immigration, and natural disaster. At present, she is collaborating on a random nationwide survey of coping with the terrorist attacks of September 11.

As part of her commitment to providing high-quality care to children and their families, Dr. Holman is exploring ways to apply her research in a clinical setting. As a practicing health professional, Dr. Holman has a longstanding interest in the complex set of relationships that influence both the quality and delivery of patient care. She recently has begun developing an educational program for health professionals to help them understand and communicate more effectively with traumatized primary care patients and their families.

James F. Munroe received the Sarah Haley Award for Clinical Excellence, given to a clinician in direct service to traumatized individuals and whose written and/or verbal communications to the field exemplify the word of Sara Haley. Munroe is the clinical director of the Veterans Improvement Program (VIP) at the Boston Veterans Administration Outpatient Clinic, deputy director of the PTSD Outpatient Clinic, and staff associate at the National Center for PTSD in Boston.


Winner of the Sarah Haley Award for Clinical Excellence, James F. Munroe.
 

Besides his extensive work with veterans that span 30 years, Munroe has traveled to many countries lecturing on PTSD. He is responsible for ISTSS conference debriefing sessions, which still continue. Extensively involved with the Red Cross, he is the liaison between the American Red Cross and the Department of Veterans Affairs for deploying staff.With the Red Cross, he has done extensive work on disaster mental health committees, training, and helping indirect victims of disasters including Red Cross staff, hotel workers, interpreters, media, etc.

Recent Red Cross Deployments include: Egypt Air Flight 990 crash; Worcester fire; Wakefield office shooting; Logan International Airport Aviation Disaster Drill; Oak Hill Middle School bus disaster; Massachusetts floods; and served as assistant officer for Family Assistance Center at Logan Airport, departing airport of the two flights that hit the World Trade Center.

Student Research Grant Award winners were Anne Dietrich, a psychologist with the Correctional Service of Canada working on her doctorate degree at the University of British Columbia, and Monique LeBlanc, currently completing her predoctoral internship at the Medical University of South Carolina.

Dietrich's professional background includes research, teaching, crisis intervention and psychotherapy, with a specialization in traumatic stress. She has taught psychology at Simon Fraser University and is an instructor at the University of British Columbia. She currently works as a psychologist with the Correctional Service of Canada.

Dietrich is the recipient of various graduate fellowships, including several UBC graduate fellowships; a three-year doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) to study complex posttraumatic stress disorder; a Green Cross Foundation fellowship; and most recently, an IODE War Memorial Scholarship. Dietrich has been actively involved with volunteer work since 1987 and currently is treasurer and president-elect of the Canadian Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. She also sits on the board of directors for the Canadian Traumatic Stress Network.

LeBlanc's dissertation, "Family violence exposure and family relationship skills in adolescents exposed to community violence," focuses on community violence exposure in adolescents. In particular, she is investigating the moderating influence of family conflict and parent-adolescent communication skills upon the relation between community violence exposure and psychological distress, positive adjustment and conduct, including health behaviors.

Her overall research interests involve the interaction between community and family violence exposure and physical abuse in adolescent populations. Moreover, she is interested in the association between violence exposure, physical abuse, health behaviors, health care utilization, and physical and psychological outcomes with the goal of intervention within the primary care setting.

Dart Award
Director of the Dart Award for Excellence in Reporting on Victims of Violence Migael Scherer announced the 2001 award winners. The Baltimore Sun won for "The Joseph Palczynski Story," a two-part series on the lives of six women serially victimized by one man's physical and psychological abuse; and The Newark Star-Ledger won honorable mention for "After the Fire," a seven-part series about two young men seriously burned in the dormitory fire at Seton Hall University.

Held the day after the Friendship and Recognition Dinner was the Student Poster Award Presentation. Winning first place was Iris M. Engelhard for her poster, "Intrusion-Based Reasoning and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder After Exposure to a Train Disaster: A Longitudinal Study."

Winning honorable mention was Angela Dixon for her poster, Trauma and Psychological Disorders in Female Juvenile Offenders."


Past president Bonnie Green with first-place poster award winner Iris M. Engelhard.

Past president Bonnie Green with Angela Dixon, who won honorable mention for her poster.


Stuart Turner, ISTSS secretary (left); and Ulrich Schnyder, ESTSS immediate past president, following the Friendship and Recognition Dinner.


Alethea Smith, chair of the ISTSS Student Section, reminds student members to mark their calendars for the ISTSS 18th Annual Meeting, November 7-10, 2002, at the Baltimore Marriott Waterfront Hotel, Baltimore, Maryland.

Attendees at a Special Interest Group (SIG) meeting.
14 SIGs hosted meetings for more than 225 conference attendees.