The Rema Lapouse Award for excellence in the field of psychiatric epidemiology will be awarded to Avshalom Caspi and Terrie Moffitt of Duke University this year. They will receive this coveted award presented by the Mental Health, Epidemiology and Statistics Sections, at a special session in their honor on Oct. 27 at 4:30 p.m., where they will present the Rema Lapouse Lecture.

TERRIE E. MOFFITT is Professor at Duke University in the departments of Psychology and Neurosciences, Psychiatry and Behavioral Science, and the Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy. She is also professor of social behavior and development at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London.  A licensed clinical psychologist, Moffitt received her clinical training at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute (1982-1984) and a doctorate in Psychology at the University of Southern California (1984).

Dr. Moffit studies how genes and environment work together to shape abnormal human behavior. Her particular interest is in antisocial and criminal behavior; depression, psychosis and addiction are also areas of interest. She is associate director of the Dunedin Longitudinal Study, which follows 1,000 people born in 1972 in New Zealand. She also directs the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Study, which follows 1,100 British families with twins born in 1994.

For her research, she has received the American Psychological Association's Early Career Contribution Award (1993) and Distinguished Career Award in Clinical Child Psychology (2006). Terrie was awarded a Royal Society-Wolfson Merit Award (2002-2007) and was co-recipient of the Stockholm Prize in Criminology (2007). She is a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (1999), the American Society of Criminology (2003), the British Academy (2004), Academia Europaea (2005), and the American Academy of Political and Social Science (2008). She has served on investigative panels for institutions such as the Nuffield Council on Bioethics and the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

AVSHALOM CASPI was born in Israel and educated in the United States (PhD, Cornell University, 1986).  Dr. Caspi has served on the faculties of Harvard, Wisconsin, the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London and Duke University.  His research spans the fields of psychology, epidemiology and genetics. 

Dr. Caspi’s  current research seeks to answer three questions:     (1) What are the best ways to assess and measure personality differences between people, and how do such differences shape health, wealth, and relationships?  (2) How and why do adverse psychological experiences in childhood give rise to poor physical health in adulthood?  And (3)  How do genetic differences between people shape the way they respond to their environments; in particular, how do genes alter resistance to psychological stress?

For his research, he has received the American Psychological Association's  Early Career Contribution Award, the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development, and the Sackler Prize in Developmental Psychobiology awarded jointly by Columbia and Cornell Medical Schools.