Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, Campus Box 345
University of Colorado Boulder
Boulder, CO 80309-0345
Erik Willcutt, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and Faculty Fellow of the Institute for Behavioral Genetics. Dr. Willcutt received his Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of Denver in 1998. After completing his clinical internship at the University of Chicago Department of Psychiatry, he received an NIH National Research Service Award individual postdoctoral fellowship to fund training in behavioral and molecular genetics at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, University of Colorado, Boulder, and has remained at the University of Colorado since that time. He was recently awarded the 2007 Early Career Research Award by Division 53 (Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology) of the American Psychological Association and the 2007 Faculty Research Award by the University of Colorado. Dr. Willcutt is Principal Investigator or co-Investigator on several ongoing studies funded by the National Institutes of Health, and he has authored or co-authored over 70 book chapters, review articles and journal articles.
Dr. Willcutt's research program focuses on the identification of etiological factors that lead to the development of psychopathology, with a specific focus on childhood disruptive disorders and learning disabilities. In addition to behavioral and molecular genetic studies, his collaborative projects with Dr. Marie Banich, Dr. Tim Curran, and Dr. Randy O’Reilly employ techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, event-related potentials, and neural network modeling to identify the specific neural substrates that play a role in these disorders. By integrating these results with data from clinical studies, we hope to develop comprehensive models that explain how genetic and environmental risk factors influence brain development and lead to the final behavioral symptoms of these disorders.
Selected Publications:
Frank, M., Santamaria, A., O’Reilly, R. & Willcutt, E. G. (2007). Testing Computational Models of Dopamine and Noradrenaline Dysfunction in Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Neuropsychopharmacology, 32, 1583 - 1599.
Nigg, J. T., Willcutt, E. G., Doyle, A. E., & Sonuga-Barke, E. J. S. (2005). Heterogenous Causality in ADHD: The Need for a Neuropsychologically Impaired Subtype. Biological Psychiatry, 57, 1231 - 1238.
Willcutt, E. G., Pennington, B. F., Chhabildas, N. A., Olson, R. K., & Hulslander, J. L. (2005). Neuropsychological analyses of comorbidity between RD and ADHD: in search of the common deficit. Developmental Neuropsychology, 27, 35-78.
Willcutt, E. G., Doyle, A. E., Nigg, J. T., Faraone, S. V., & Pennington, B. F. (2005). A meta-analytic review of the executive function theory of ADHD. Biological Psychiatry, 57, 1336-1346.