The journal American Psychologist — which is received automatically by any member of the APA — has just published an obituary for UNC Greensboro graduate Dr. Norman Anderson. Dr. Anderson was born right here in Greensboro, earning his MA and Ph.D in clinical psychology under the direction of Dr. Rosemery Nelson-Gray. He went on to become the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the American Psychological Association (APA), which is the top association for professional psychologists in the United States and the publisher of many of our major journals. He was also the founder of the National Institutes of Health Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research in the late 1990s, whose stated goal is to accelerate health-relevant scientific discovery via behavioral and social sciences research. Anderson was one of the first scientists to study how racism-related stress impacted the health of Black people in the United States, most notably in a famous 1989 Psychological Bulletin paper on how stress was associated with hypertension (high blood pressure) in Black Americans.
A long-time friend of UNC Greensboro and the Department of Psychology, he was a frequent visitor to the department and endowed several important prizes including the Norman B. Anderson Research Award to support graduate student research, particularly work aimed at supporting diversity in science or among scientists, and the Norman Anderson Travel Award (NATA) to support dissemination of scientific work conducted in the department at conferences.
