Arthur D. Anastopoulos, Ph.D.
Executive Director
Arthur D. Anastopoulos, Ph.D., is the Executive Director of Empowering Student Success LLC and holds the position of Professor Emeritus in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG).
Dr. Anastopoulos received his B.A. in Child Study from Tufts University, his M.A. in General/ Experimental Psychology from Wake Forest University, and his Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from Purdue University. As part of his doctoral training, Dr. Anastopoulos completed a one-year clinical internship at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, where he received specialty training in both Pediatric Psychology and Cognitive Therapy. He began his career as a Staff Psychologist in the Department of Pediatrics at the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Thereafter, he held a nine-year joint appointment in the Departments of Psychiatry and Pediatrics at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center, where he also served as Chief of the ADHD Clinic founded by Dr. Russell A. Barkley. From the time he joined the UNCG faculty in 1995 until his retirement in the spring of 2022, Dr. Anastopoulos directed a nationally recognized ADHD Clinic that provided state-of-the-art assessment/treatment services to the community, conducted advanced clinical training for graduate students, and served as a site for cutting-edge clinical research.
Throughout his career, Dr. Anastopoulos’ clinical and research interests have focused on the development and implementation of evidence-based assessment and intervention strategies for individuals with ADHD across the life span. Among his contributions to assessment, Dr. Anastopoulos was a member of the team that developed the internationally recognized ADHD Rating Scale-IV and ADHD Rating Scale-5 and was first author on a widely used text for practitioners entitled, Assessing Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder. Early in his career, Dr. Anastopoulos participated in innovative clinical trial research examining the efficacy of a cognitive-behavioral parent training program for families of children with ADHD, as well as a family-based cognitive-behavioral intervention for adolescents with ADHD and their parents.
An increased awareness of the challenges faced by college students with ADHD was the impetus for Dr. Anastopoulos taking on the role of lead Principal Investigator on two large-scale multi-site studies examining this population. The first of these was a National Institutes of Mental Health funded 5-year project entitled, “Longitudinal Outcome of College Students with ADHD,” the results of which have expanded our understanding of how ADHD impacts young adults in college. The second project was a 4-year randomized controlled trial funded by the Institute of Educational Sciences (U.S. Department of Education) entitled, “Improving the Educational and Social-Emotional Functioning of College Students with ADHD,” which provided strong support for the efficacy of the ACCESS Program that Dr. Anastopoulos and his colleagues created, developed, and pilot tested in an earlier open clinical trial.
In his capacity as Executive Director of the Empowering Student Success LLC, Dr. Anastopoulos and his colleagues are actively engaged in creating more opportunities for college students with ADHD to participate in ACCESS programming. In addition to these dissemination efforts, Dr. Anastopoulos continues to present his research findings at national and international scientific meetings, which to date has resulted in the publication of more than one hundred journal articles, book chapters, and books related to the clinical management of ADHD across the lifespan.