Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D.
Founding President
Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology, Medicine, Neurology, Psychiatry, and Surgery at the University of Arizona, at the main campus in Tucson. In addition to teaching courses on health and spiritual psychology, he is the Director of the Laboratory for Advances in Consciousness and Health. Gary received his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University in 1971 and was an assistant professor at Harvard for five years. He later served as a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Yale University, was director of the Yale Psychophysiology Center, and co-director of the Yale Behavioral Medicine Clinic, before moving to Arizona in 1988.
In September, 2002 he received a $1.8 million dollars award from the National Center on Complementary and Alternative Medicine of the National Institutes of Health to create a Center for Frontier Medicine in Biofield Science at the University of Arizona, which he directed for four years. Gary collaborated with Canyon Ranch on biofield science and energy healing research and served as the Corporate Director of Development of Energy Healing.
Gary has published more than four hundred and fifty scientific papers, including six papers in the journal Science. Gary has also co-edited eleven academic books, and is the author of The Sacred Promise (2011), The Energy Healing Experiments (2007), The G.O.D. Experiments (2006), The Afterlife Experiments (2002), The Truth about Medium (2005), and The Living Energy Universe (1999). The Energy Healing Experiments (2007) received the Gold Medial from the Nautilus Book Awards. His new books are An Atheist in Heaven (2016), written with Paul Davids, and Super Synchronicity (2017).
Gary is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the Academy for Behavioral Medicine Research. He received a Young Psychologist Award and an Early Career Award for Distinguished Research from the American Psychological Association. He served as President of the Biofeedback Society of America and the Health Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association. In 2004 he received a Distinguished Scientist Award for Energy Psychology from the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology, and in 2006 a Distinguished Scientist Award from the United States Psychotronic Association. In 2012 he received the Distinguished Contribution to the Science of Psychology from the Arizona Psychological Association.
Gary is highly experienced in speaking publicly about health psychology, energy healing, and spiritual research, and is in high demand. He has been interviewed on major network television shows including Dateline and Good Morning America, as well as on MSNBC, Nightline, Anderson Cooper 360, and The O’Reilly Factor. His work has been the subject of documentaries and profiles on Discovery, HBO, Arts & Entertainment, Fox, History and the SciFi Channel, among others. Gary has been interviewed on hundreds of radio shows, including four evenings on Art Bell’s Coast to Coast AM, and on PBS, CBC and BBC. His work has been described in various magazines and newspapers including USA Today, the London Times, The New York Times, and The LA Times, as well as a feature profile in Biography magazine.