Wayne Fisher, Ph.D., is a winner of the University of Nebraska’s Outstanding Research and Creative Activity (ORCA) Award.
Dr. Fisher will be honored today at the annual faculty meeting.
Chancellor to speak
UNMC Chancellor Jeffrey P. Gold, M.D., will give his annual address to the faculty at 4 p.m. today in the Durham Research Center Auditorium as part of the annual faculty meeting. Faculty Senate President Gay Canaris, M.D., assistant professor, internal medicine, College of Medicine, will provide an overview of the year’s activities. Following the address and the award presentations, Dr. Gold will host a reception in the center’s foyer.
Awards will be presented for Outstanding Teacher, Spirit of Community Service, Outstanding Faculty Mentor of Graduate Students and Outstanding Mentor of Junior Faculty, as well as the University of Nebraska’s Outstanding Teaching and Instructional Creativity Award (OTICA) and Outstanding Research and Creative Activity (ORCA) Award. Faculty members also will be recognized for their 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40 years of service.
As the H.B. Monroe Professor of Behavioral Research and director of the Center for Autism Spectrum Disorders (CASD) at the Munroe-Meyer Institute, Dr. Fisher oversees four clinical programs — Autism Diagnostic Clinic, Severe Behavior Disorders Program, Early Intervention Program, and Virtual Care Program.
That position, and his groundbreaking research into the assessment and treatment of severe destructive behavior, has allowed Dr. Fisher to directly improve the lives of literally hundreds of children and their families in the city of Omaha, across the state of Nebraska and beyond, said Brian Greer, Ph.D., assistant professor at CASD and one of Dr. Fisher’s nominators for the award.
“Not only have Dr. Fisher’s pursuits improved the lives of countless children and their families, but his work has inspired scores of professionals to emulate his excellence in clinical research and his relentless pursuit of helping children with autism,” Dr. Greer said.
Dr. Fisher’s patients are at the heart of his research, which has been supported by secured federal grant funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Mental Health, Department of Defense, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.
“My research is motivated largely by a desire to integrate basic and applied behavioral research findings to produce the best possible outcomes for my patients,” Dr. Fisher said. “I have come to appreciate how basic research on quantitative models of behavior can lead to important clinical innovations and refinements that, at first glance, might seem counter intuitive from a clinician’s perspective.”
Dr. Fisher said he’s also learned that approaching every clinical case, in part, from a scientist’s perspective — by introducing and evaluating treatment components systematically — often leads to better clinical outcomes and also facilitates the identification of new, clinically relevant research questions.
“Thus, I view translational behavioral research as a two-way conversation between basic and applied researchers, informed by data, with the ultimate goal of producing better clinical outcomes.”
Asked for his life’s goal, Dr. Fisher said:
“I am not a Freudian psychologist by any stretch of the imagination, but Freud said something to the effect of the goal of a good life is to love others and to work. I don’t think that anyone has ever said it better.”