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By Phil Williams
pwilliam@franklin.uga.edu
Rex Forehand, director of UGA’s Institute for Behavioral Research and Research Professor of  Psychology, has been named a Regents Professor. The appointment has been approved by the board of regents and is effective Aug. 16.
Regents Professorships are granted by the University System of Georgia Board of Regents to outstanding faculty members for an initial period of three years, with possible renewal for a second three-year period. Awardees receive a $10,000 permanent increase in salary, in addition to the merit raise in the year of initial appointment. They also receive a yearly fund of $5,000 in support of their scholarship.
“I am very honored to be selected as a Regents Professor,” says Forehand. “I have always been very well supported in my research, teaching and service activities at UGA, and this is another indication of such support.”
Other Regents Professors at UGA are R. Bruce King, chemistry; Edward Kanemasu and Malcolm Sumner, crop and soil sciences; Bernard Patten, ecology; Mike Doyle, food science and technology; Cameron Fincher, higher education and psychology; Charles Hofer, management; Jeremy Kilpatrick, mathematics education; William Gary Love, physics; Emory Thomas, history; and Delmer Dunn and Loch Johnson, political science.
Forehand says that others deserve credit for the award as well.
“I have had the opportunity over the past 29 years at UGA to work with outstanding graduate students and colleagues,” he says. “The professorship symbolizes their efforts as much as mine.”
Since he joined the UGA faculty in 1971, Forehand has devoted his scholarly career to the study of the American family. He has developed and tested clinical interventions to help parents with their children and studied ways in which families cope with psychological, stress, and health problems. Last year, he received a five-year, $5 million grant from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to study how parents can best communicate with children to reduce high-risk sexual behavior.
Forehand’s treatment program for “oppositional” behaviors in children is used by mental-health professionals throughout the world.
“He is a scholar who is not only an internationally known psychologist but one who has really made a difference in the lives of children and families, as well as in the lives of his students at the university,” says Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, the Virginia and Leonard Marx Professor of Child Development and director of the Center for Children and Families at Columbia University.
Forehand is the recipient of numerous teaching and research awards, including the Sandy Beaver Teaching Award in 1985 and the UGA Creative Research Medal in 1987.
The author or co-author of more than 300 articles in refereed journals, 32 chapters and two books, Forehand also has served on 15 editorial boards for professional journals and is now an editorial board member for nine scholarly journals.
The intent of Regents Professorships is to honor truly distinguished scholarship. The publications or creative works of Regents Professors should be “innovative and pace setting and result in a significant new understanding of concepts in the field,” according to the regents’ description of the position.
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