Dante Cicchetti, PhD, Professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the Institute of Child Development, is the recipient of the 2021 Bowlby-Ainsworth Award from the Center for Mental Health Promotion. This award is in recognition of Cicchetti’s research on the importance of early experience in development and his role in securing a place for attachment theory in developmental psychopathology.

The Bowlby-Ainsworth Awards recognize senior scholars who have exemplified the standards of scholarship, collegiality and service that John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth shared, taught and valued. Nominations are made by the Awards Committee of the Center for Mental Health Promotion and past recipients of the award. Selections are then made by the Awards Committee and The New York Attachment Consortium. The New York Attachment Consortium is a project of the Center for Mental Health Promotion that brings together developmental and clinical psychologists and psychiatrists in the New York metropolitan area working to advance attachment theory and research in the Bowlby-Ainsworth tradition.

Cicchetti’s research interests include the study of attachment relations and representational models of the self and its disorders across the life span in support of his overarching interest in the formulation of an integrative developmental theory that can account for both normal and abnormal forms of ontogenesis.