Dr. Fisher honored with translational research award

Wayne Fisher, Ph.D., director of the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders at the Munroe-Meyer Institute, recently was awarded the 2018 Don Hake Translational Research Award from Division 25 of the American Psychological Association (APA). The award is sponsored by the Society for the Experimental Analysis of Behavior.

The award recognizes distinguished research that bridges the basic/applied continuum of behavior analysis and represents the cross fertilization of both branches of this field of science.

Dr. Fisher will be honored with the award at the 126th Annual APA Convention in San Francisco in August.

Dr. Fisher said receiving the award was very gratifying.

“The award is almost always given to individuals who primarily are basic researchers and have done something to extend their research to make it more practical for an applied or clinical situation,” he said.

As a clinician, Dr. Fisher said he received the award for using basic research principles in his clinical work.

“I developed the pair-choice preference assessment that is widely used to help accurately assess what are likely to be effective reinforcers for children with autism or intellectual disabilities, where they can’t tell you what they like the best,” he said. “That assessment was a direct application of basic research on the principles of choice responding.”

Currently, he is doing grant-funded research on treatment relapse using mathematical models of behavior to predict when destructive behaviors like aggression and self-injurious behavior may re-emerge after a treatment has reduced those behaviors to near-zero levels.

“We are trying to identify the variables that may contribute to treatment relapse?” he said. “We are now taking the findings of basic research and applying them to our treatments and having pretty good success in developing procedures that prevent or lessen treatment relapse.”

His nominators, MMI’s Brian Greer, Ph.D., and David Wacker, Ph.D., of the Children’s Hospital of Iowa Center for Disabilities and Development, called Dr. Fisher “certainly one of the most respected and productive researchers in applied behavior analysis.”

Dr. Fisher’s nomination also was supported by leaders throughout the field.

Henry Roane, Ph.D., chief of the division of development, behavior and genetics at the Upstate Medical University in Syracuse, N.Y., said he was surprised to learn Dr. Fisher had not yet received the award.

“Simply put, Dr. Fisher is one of the four leading researchers worldwide in the area of autism spectrum disorders and applied behavior analysis,” Dr. Roane said in his nomination letter.

MMI Director Karoly Mirnics, M.D., Ph.D., said the institute was “very pleased and proud that the national scientific community recognizes the amazing translational research by Dr. Fisher and his team.

“In my mind the award is way overdue,” Dr. Mirnics said. “Most importantly, Dr. Fisher’s work continues to change the lives of our patients and their families, and I know that for him, that is the greatest reward that he can receive.”