Dr. Andrew Christensen Named Winner of 2025 Alfred M. Wellner Lifetime Achievement Award for Research

The National Register of Health Service Psychologists is proud to present the 2025 Alfred M. Wellner Lifetime Achievement Award for Research to Dr. Andrew Christensen.  

This award is named in honor of the National Register’s first Executive Officer, Alfred M. Wellner, PhD. The Wellner awards, offered for research and practice, are the highest honors bestowed by the National Register. The research excellence award honors a National Register credentialed psychologist who has made—through research—a significant lifetime contribution toward health service psychology.   

The National Register’s Awards Committee selected Dr. Christensen for the Wellner Award for Research based on his numerous and outstanding contributions to the profession through scholarship, supervision, development of innovative interventions, and professional involvement at the state, national, and international level. 

Upon receiving the award, Dr. Christensen said, “I am deeply honored to have received the Alfred M. Wellner Lifetime Achievement Award for excellence in research from the National Register of Health Service Psychologists. Based on my convictions that the most important context for our lives is our family relationships and that these relationships have profound influences on our individual well-being, I have devoted most of my professional life to clinical research on couples and couple conflict with the goal of increasing the effectiveness and reach of couple interventions. I have been a member of the National Register for virtually my entire career and view it as a vital and vibrant organization of psychologists devoted to promoting the mental health care of Americans.”   

Andrew Christensen, PhD, a Distinguished Research Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, studies couple conflict and couple therapy and has published extensively on these topics. Along with the late Neil S. Jacobson, Christensen developed and evaluated a new treatment for couples, Integrative Behavioral Couple Therapy (IBCT), which was adopted by the US Department of Veteran’s Affairs in 2010 as their evidence-based approach for dealing with couples. Since 2010, Christensen has led an IBCT training program for therapists in the VA. Dr. Brian Doss, a professor of psychology at the University of Miami, and Christensen adapted IBCT into an online program, www.OurRelationship.com. Both IBCT and OurRelationship have been shown through extensive research to be effective treatments for couples with benefits extending to the well-being of the partners and of their children. Research has further shown that the OurRelationship program is an effective intervention for low-income couples, military couples, and veteran couples. Christensen has given workshops on IBCT throughout the world. His work has been cited in multiple news outlets such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time Magazine, Newsweek, and USA Today.  

Dr. Christensen has been credentialed by the National Register since 1987. 

About the National Register of Health Service Psychologists  

The National Register of Health Service Psychologists was established in 1974 and is the largest nonprofit credentialing organization for licensed psychologists and psychology doctoral students. The National Register is an independent nonprofit organization dedicated to improving healthcare by identifying psychologists who meet specific education and training standards, and by verifying these professionals to consumers, healthcare organizations, and regulatory bodies. The National Register currently credentials 10,000 Health Service Psychologists and has approximately 5,000 psychology doctoral student and postdoctoral trainee members in its Associate Program. For more information, visit www.nationalregister.org.  

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For more information about this announcement, contact the National Register at 202.783.7663.