Lee Anna Clark

Lee Anna Clark is the University of Notre Dame William J. and Dorothy K. O’Neill Professor of Psychology, Co-Director of the Center for Advanced Measurement of Personality and Psychopathology, and currently serves as Chair of the Department of Psychology. She earned B.A. and M.A. degrees from Cornell University, and her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Minnesota, with a minor in Personality. During her 17 years at the University of Iowa, she served as Director of Clinical Training and Associate Provost for Faculty and was awarded the University of Iowa Regents’ Award for Faculty Excellence, 2006. She also has received the Jack Block Award for Distinguished Research in Personality from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the Zubin Award for Lifetime Contributions to the Understanding of Psychopathology from the Society for Research in Psychopathology (SRP), and the John Gunderson Senior Researcher Award from the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorder. She also received SRP’s John Neale Sustained Mentorship Award.

She has served on the editorial boards of multiple journals and as Associate Editor of Journal of Abnormal Psychology. She is a Fellow of APS and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology, has served as President of both the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology and the Society for Research in Psychopathology, was recently elected Federation Vice-President of the International Society for the Study of Personality Disorder, and is or has been on the executive boards of three other professional organizations.

Her research focuses on personality disorder assessment, for which she authored the Schedule for Nonadaptive and Adaptive Personality (SNAP), which measures personality traits across the normal-abnormal spectrum. She has been a leading proponent of using trait dimensions rather than categories to diagnose personality disorder for over 35 years, and served on the DSM-5 Personality and Personality Disorders Work Group, which developed a trait-dimensional diagnostic system for the DSM-5 Section III, Emerging Models and Measures. She also is a leading researcher into the link between personality and psychopathology, served on a number of cross-cutting study and advisory groups for DSM-5.

Her current research focus, which has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, is to identify the core elements of personality pathology and psychosocial disability that are needed to diagnose personality pathology. In particular, her research involves increasing our understanding of, and ability to assess: (1) the specific traits that comprise each of the major domains of personality; (2) the core deficits in self-functioning and interpersonal relationships that underlie personality pathology; and (3) how psychosocial dysfunction relates to personality traits and dysfunction.