Director
National Institute on Aging
Bethesda, Maryland
Lisa Onken directs the Behavior Change and Intervention program in the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences at the National Institute on Aging (NIA) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She received her Ph.D. in clinical and in personality psychology from Northwestern University. After completing her clinical psychology internship at Cook County Hospital, she practiced as a clinician at the University of Illinois Health Sciences Center and subsequently conducted research on individual differences, benzodiazepines and sleep at the Department of Behavioral Biology at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. In 1987 she joined the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA, NIH), where she developed a program of research on behavior and combined treatments for drug abuse and co-morbid behavioral and emotional disorders and served the Chief of the Behavioral and Integrative Treatment Branch and the Associate Director for Treatment. Throughout her NIH career, she has been actively involved in multiple trans-NIH initiatives, including leading an initiative on Facilitating Interdisciplinary Research via Methodological and Technological Innovation in the Behavioral and Social Sciences and actively participating as a Project Scientist and a member of the Implementation Team of the NIH Common Fund Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) program. After joining NIA in 2015, she continues to pursue her interest in the development, testing, and elucidation of the mechanism(s) of behavior change of behavioral interventions, with the goal of producing potent interventions that are maximally implementable. To this end, she has championed the “NIH Stage Model,” a conceptual framework that emphasizes the integration of basic science into the behavioral intervention development process to foster the development of principle-driven, potent, and scalable interventions. She is a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and she serves as a consulting editor for Clinical Psychological Science.
Saturday, November 19, 2022
3:30 PM – 5:00 PM EST