DETROIT — Mark Lumley, Ph.D., distinguished professor of psychology in Wayne State University’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, was recently awarded the 2024 Nathan W. Perry, Jr. Award for Career Service to Health Psychology from the Society for Health Psychology.

The Society for Health Psychology is a national nonprofit that seeks to improve the lives of individuals and society by promoting health, preventing illness and improving health care through research, practice, education, training and advocacy.

“I’m delighted and greatly honored for this recognition,” said Lumley. “I, along with my excellent students and collaborators, have been contributing to the field of health psychology for nearly four decades and I am so pleased that my colleagues in this national society recognize the influence that our work has had on the field, particularly chronic pain disorders.”

Lumley is a native of Detroit and attended Wayne State University as an undergraduate, majoring in both psychology and biology. In 1990, he completed his Ph.D. in clinical and health psychology at the University of Florida in Gainesville. After a one-year post-doctoral fellowship in behavioral medicine at the University of Michigan, he joined the faculty in the Department of Psychology at Wayne State University. He became a distinguished professor in 2017, worked as the director of training for Wayne State’s clinical psychology Ph.D. program for 17 years and has mentored nearly 50 students to their Ph.D. In 2018, the Society for Health Psychology recognized Lumley with the Excellence in Health Psychology Mentoring Award.

Lumley was lauded by the society and many of his colleagues for his development of a psychological therapy addressing trauma and suppressed emotions that often underlie some types of chronic pain and other “psychophysiological” or “stress-related” somatic conditions. Along with his colleague, Howard Schubiner, M.D., from Michigan State University, Lumley developed a new therapy called Emotional Awareness and Expression Therapy (EAET). Unlike traditional psychological treatments for chronic pain, EAET focuses on a person's emotional experiences — with particular attention to how these experiences developed over the course of the patient’s life, how emotions that are suppressed or avoided contribute to pain, and how therapy can reverse this emotional avoidance and reduce or even eliminate pain.

“My early research showed how a lack of expressing one’s feelings can contribute to chronic pain and that writing or talking about stressors and your feelings can improve chronic pain,” said Lumley. “This work then allowed us to develop and test a new psychological therapy for chronic pain. The society has recognized my goal of moving the field forward toward new methods of treatment with the potential to help so many more people.”

Lumley and his colleague, John Burns, Ph.D., of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, are principal investigators on a four-year, $3,064,088 grant, “Comparative mechanisms (mediators, moderators) of psychosocial chronic pain treatments,” from the National Institute of Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health. They are conducting a clinical trial comparing EAET to two leading psychological pain management approaches in the field. This trial will determine how these therapies compare on outcomes, as well as how the therapies work and who is helped the most by each one. For more information about the study, email paintreatmentstudy@gmail.com.

“Dr. Lumley is most deserving of this recognition for his important research focused on chronic pain disorders,” said Ezemenari M. Obasi, Ph.D., vice president for research & innovation at Wayne State University. “His contributions to this field are making a difference in the lives of countless people.”

The grant number for the award from the National Institute of Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health is NR020610.

# # #

About Wayne State University

Wayne State University is one of the nation’s pre-eminent public research universities in an urban setting. Through its multidisciplinary approach to research and education, and its ongoing collaboration with government, industry and other institutions, the university seeks to enhance economic growth and improve the quality of life in the city of Detroit, state of Michigan and throughout the world. For more information about research at Wayne State University, visit research.wayne.edu.

Wayne State University’s research efforts are dedicated to a prosperity agenda that betters the lives of our students, supports our faculty in pushing the boundaries of knowledge and innovation further, and strengthens the bonds that interconnect Wayne State and our community. To learn more about Wayne State University’s prosperity agenda, visit president.wayne.edu/prosperity-agenda.