The winner of this year’s Board of Directors Faculty Recognition Award is a professor in both UConn’s dental and medical schools.
Mark Litt is professor in the UConn School of Dental Medicine’s Division of Behavioral Sciences and Community Health, and also holds a joint appointment as a professor in the UConn School of Medicine’s Departments of Psychiatry and Obstetrics and Gynecology.
“Mark is highly deserving of this recognition,” says Dr. R. Lamont MacNeil, dean of the UConn School of Dental Medicine. “His research work in the areas of substance abuse and chronic pain has been exceptional and he has made important contributions in many other ways to the academic life of the School of Dental Medicine and the Health Center.”
Litt is credited with being an internationally recognized leader in the study of the cognitive, behavioral and affective processes that lead to changes in behavior in areas such as substance abuse, chronic pain and anxiety control.
“Receiving the Faculty Recognition Award is an immense honor,” Litt says. “I am humbled and gratified that my work at the Health Center is being recognized by my peers. This makes me want to work harder to justify this award.”
Litt joined the UConn Health Center in 1986 on a National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychiatry. Two years later he was appointed assistant professor in both the medical and dental schools. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1993. He became a full dental professor in 2000 and medical professor in 2008.
Over his Health Center career, Litt has received continuous funding from the National Institutes of Health since 1991, including eight grants focusing on the cognitive behavioral management of pain and cognitive behavioral intervention in addiction. His commitments to the predoctoral and postdoctoral programs in the dental and medical schools include serving as director of clinical training for the greater Hartford clinical psychology internship program. He has served as course director for the dental practice and professional development curriculum, been a member of more than 20 school and Health Center committees, and has chaired the Senior Appointments and Promotions Committee since 2001. He provides patient consultative services across the Health Center and serves as the dental school’s director of temporomandibular disorder (TMD) research.
Litt earned his M.S., M.Phil. and Ph.D. in psychology from Yale University. He has written 18 book chapters and more than 60 peer-reviewed manuscripts and articles. He has more than 100 scholarly presentations to his credit, has served on the editorial boards of three journals in the field of behavioral medicine, and has been a reviewer for more than 20 scientific journals. He is a fellow of both the Society of Behavioral Medicine and the American Psychological Association.
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