Michael W. Otto

I am a Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. I have had a major career focus on developing and validating new psychosocial treatments for anxiety, mood, psychotic, and substance use disorders, with a particular focus on treatment refractory populations. This includes a translational research agenda investigating brain-behavior relationships in therapeutic learning. My focus on hard-to-treat conditions and principles underlying behavior-change failures led me to an additional focus on health behavior promotion, including investigations of addictive behaviors, medication adherence, sleep, and exercise. Across these health behaviors, I have been concerned with cognitive, attention, and affective factors that derail adaptive behaviors, and the factors that can rescue these processes. I also investigate exercise as an intervention for affective and addictive disorders, as well as for cognitive enhancement. I have over 400 publications spanning these research interests, and have been identified as a “top producer” in the clinical empirical literature, and an ISI Highly Cited Researcher. I am a Past President of the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies, and am currently President of Division 12 of the American Psychological Association.

December 2016