CV

Antonio Puente, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, has been elected 2017 president of the American Psychological Association. He will serve as APA’s president-elect in 2016.
Puente is also the founder and co-director of the Cape Fear Clinic, a bilingual mental health clinic for the poor and uninsured and holds appointments as a visiting professor at the Universidad de Granada, Spain, University of California, Los Angeles and the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
During his presidency one of Puente’s priorities will be to continue the focus on integrating psychology into comprehensive healthcare.
“Psychology is the only viable discipline in position to provide an integrative care model wherein all health care disciplines collaborate to produce better outcomes at lower costs,” said Puente. “The initial step is to erase the divide between physical and mental health, all the while buttressing our efforts in mental health. Psychology will be the catalyst for integrative healthcare.”
Puente is a past-president of the North Carolina Psychological Association, North Carolina Psychological Foundation, National Academy of Neuropsychology, Society for Clinical Neuropsychology and Hispanic Neuropsychological Society.
A member of APA since 1979, Puente has served two terms as the APA council representative for the Society for Clinical Neuropsychology. He has chaired the Psychology Academy of the National Academies of Practice and several APA boards and committees ranging from the Board of Convention Affairs to the Committee on Psychological Tests and Assessment. He served on the Joint Committee for the Revision of the Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing. Puente was APA’s representative to the American Medical Association’s Current Procedural Terminology panel from 1993 to 2008 and has served on the Center for Medicare and Medicaid’s Medicare Coverage Advisory Committee.

KEYNOTE ABSTRACT

Neuropsychology: a field of professional application for clinical psychologists
Clinical neuropsychology is commonly considered as a psychology specialty. Its rapid development has provided tests, techniques and theoretical frameworks to understand the disordered behaviour from a brain behaviour perspective. These developments will be highlighted with a specific approach of introducing basic concepts in both science and practice of clinical psychology. In addition, a proposal will be developed suggesting that the historical foundations of psychology are found in the interface between physiology and philosophy, since it provided a trajectory for what would be called psychology. Therefore, it could be declare that while clinical neuropsychology might be of value to clinical psychology, clinical psychology is of value to all psychology as the fundamental pillar of which classical psychology evolved.