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Final Program


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Michael W. Otto, Ph.D. (he/him/his)

Professor
Boston University
Boston, MA, United States

Dr. Otto is Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Boston University. He has had a major career focus on developing and validating new psychosocial treatments, with a focus on treatment-refractory populations. This includes a translational research agenda investigating brain-behavior relationships in therapeutic learning, including the use of novel strategies to improve the consolidation of therapeutic learning from exposure (extinction) and other cognitive-behavioral interventions. His focus on hard-to-treat conditions and principles underlying behavior-change failures led him to an additional focus on health-behavior promotion, including investigations of addictive behaviors, medication adherence, sleep, and exercise. Across these behaviors, Dr. Otto has been concerned with cognitive and affective factors that amplify distress and/or derail adaptive behaviors. Due to a focus on principles of treatment and transdiagnostic factors, his research experience cuts across diagnostic groups and includes investigations of anxiety disorders, depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and substance use disorders. Dr. Otto has over 500 publications spanning his research interests, and was identified as a “top producer” in the clinical empirical literature as well as an ISI Highly Cited Researcher. He received the 2024 ABCT Outstanding Researcher Award and the APA Division 12 award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions to Clinical Psychology. Dr. Otto has also received an Elizabeth Hurlock Beckman Award from the APA for his mentoring contributions and has received an Outstanding Service award from Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT). Dr. Otto regularly provides CE and CME programs across his areas of clinical expertise and received the 2023 Toy Caldwell-Colbert Award for Distinguished Educator in Clinical Psychology. Dr. Otto is engaged in promoting effective team science and serves on the board of the international Exposure Therapy Consortium (https://www.exposuretherapyinfo.org/) and is founder of the Mechanistic Behavioral Research Consortium (https://www.mbrc-sobc.org/ ).

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