Cynthia Bulik, PhD, founding director of the UNC Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders, received the award from the Academy for Eating Disorders.
The Academy for Eating Disorders (AED) announced its 2022 International Conference on Eating Disorders (ICED) awardees to recognize individuals who have made significant contributions to the treatment, scientific understanding, and awareness of eating disorders globally.
Cynthia Bulik, PhD, founding director of the Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders at UNC-Chapel Hill, was honored with a lifetime achievement award for pioneering lifetime contributions to the AED and to the field of eating disorders in the areas of treatment, research, education, and administration.
Dr. Bulik, Distinguished Professor of Eating Disorders in the UNC Department of Psychiatry at the UNC School of Medicine, leads research teams at UNC-Chapel Hill and the Karolinska Institutet Centre for Eating Disorders Innovation dedicated to deepening our understanding of the underlying biology and genetics of eating disorders and to advancing the evidence base for the treatment of these illnesses.
As founder and co-chair of the Eating Disorders Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, she leads a global effort to identify actionable genomic variation in eating disorders. She is also the principal investigator of the global Eating Disorders Genetics Initiative funded by the National Institute of Mental Health. Together with Ian Carroll, PhD, she conducts population-level and intensive longitudinal clinical investigations of the intestinal microbiota in people with eating disorders.
For the past decade, with Donald Baucom, PhD, and Jennifer Kirby, PhD, Dr. Bulik has developed and disseminated a suite of couples-based interventions for anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder. She also serves as senior faculty on the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) funded National Center of Excellence for Eating Disorders – the U.S. national authoritative source for information and training in eating disorders. She is dedicated to mentorship of junior investigators, especially women in fields of science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) and is passionate about translating science for the public.