Thomas Achenbach

Biographical Sketch for Thomas M. Achenbach, Ph.D.
Thomas M. Achenbach, Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology, is President of the Research Center for Children, Youth, and Families at the University of Vermont Department of Psychiatry. A summa cum laude graduate of Yale, he received his Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Yale Child Study Center. Before moving to the University of Vermont, Dr. Achenbach taught at Yale and was a Research Psychologist at the National Institute of Mental Health. He has been a DAAD Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, Germany; an SSRC Senior Faculty Fellow at Jean Piaget’s Centre d’Épistémologie Génétique in Geneva; Chair of the American Psychological Association’s Task Force on Classification of Children’s Behavior; and a member of the American Psychiatric Association’s Advisory Committee on DSMIIIR. He has given some 250 invited presentations in 30 countries and has authored over 250 publications, including Developmental Psychopathology; Research in Developmental Psychology: Concepts, Strategies, Methods; Assessment and Taxonomy of Child and Adolescent Psychopathology; Empirically Based Taxonomy; Empirically Based Assessment of Child and Adolescent Psychopathology (with Stephanie H. McConaughy); Multicultural Understanding of Child and Adolescent Psychopathology: Implications for Mental Health Assessment (with Leslie A. Rescorla); and Manuals for the Achenbach System of Empirically Based Assessment (ASEBA). ASEBA instruments have been translated into over 79 languages. Over 6,500 publications report their use in more than 67 cultures. Dr. Achenbach’s honors include the Distinguished Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association’s Section on Clinical Child Psychology, the University Scholar Award of the University of Vermont, selection for the Institute for Scientific Information’s Most Highly Cited Authors in the World Psychiatry/Psychology Literature, and election as a Fellow of the American Psychopathological Association and four divisions of the American Psychological Association.