Published July 8, 2011 This content is archived.
Beatrice L. Wood, PhD, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics, received the 2011 Distinguished Contribution to Family Systems Research Award from the American Family Therapy Academy (AFTA).
She was honored for the internationally recognized biobehavioral family model that she has developed and tested over the course of her career.
Empirical findings based on this model have led to discoveries of how parental depression and marital discord contribute to child depression and worsen asthma through psychobiological stress pathways.
Wood received the award in June at the annual AFTA Conference in Baltimore, Md.
“In her impressive body of work, Beatrice Wood has given us a rare mix: a combination of depth, scope and detail,” said Salvador Minuchin, MD, professor emeritus at University of Pennsylvania and founder of the Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic.
“She has probed deeply into the patterns that connect family systems with child health, especially asthma, and has ventured out broadly to expand theory, develop a new heuristic model, explore the role of physiology and study the impact of social stressors on the health of vulnerable populations.”
Wood began work on her innovative approach while a student at the University of Pennsylvania.
Later, while working at Penn and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, she began testing the newly developed psychosomatic family model, which posited the influence of family processes on pediatric diabetes, asthma and anorexia nervosa.
“It became evident that our original psychosomatic model was important but limited,” noted Minuchin. “Neither pediatricians nor family clinicians were absorbing the implications. Dr. Wood reformulated and updated this model based on current social neuroscience.”
Wood continued her investigations at UB, where she joined the faculty in 1996.
Wood’s current projects focus on the impact of discrimination, poverty and other social pressures as they affect the health and adaptation of families and children.
“Her careful, high-quality research is evidence-based and translational—attributes that are currently demanded from new theories,” Minuchin noted. “She has received international recognition has been supported by numerous NIH grants.”
Wood is a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry’s Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, where she teaches family assessment and intervention and supervises resident research.
She conducts her research in, and serves as co-director of, the Center for Child and Family Asthma Studies, located at Kaleida Health’s Women and Children’s Hospital of Buffalo.
She collaborates with Bruce Miller, MD, chief of the Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, who directs the center.