Robert Kaplan is the chair of the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He is an award-winning researcher and author of 14 books and over 300 publications. He is past-president of several organizations, including the American Psychological Association Division of Health Psychology, Section J of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (Pacific), the International Society for Quality of Life Research, and the Society for Behavioral Medicine. Dr. Kaplan is the editor-in-chief of the "Annals of Behavioral Medicine" and an associate or consulting editor for several other academic journals.