Retiring director of Institute for Life Span Studies receives national award

LAWRENCE -- Stephen R. Schroeder, the first director of the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies at the University of Kansas, received the highest award given by the Association of University Centers on Disabilities.

The Distinguished Achievement Award, presented at the association's annual conference in Bethesda, Md., on Nov. 3, recognizes Schroeder's lifetime contributions to the lives of people with disabilities and their families.

Schroeder directed KU's Life Span Institute from 1990 until stepping down from that post Aug. 1. He retired Oct. 31 but will continue as the interim director of the Kansas Center for Excellence in Disabilities Education, Research and Service at KU. The center oversees several training, technical assistance and direct service programs at the Life Span Institute for people with disabilities across Kansas.

He took over the Life Span Institute at a critical juncture, when the Bureau of Child Research, Gerontology Center and the Center for Multicultural Leadership were incorporated into the Schiefelbusch Institute for Life Span Studies.

Under Schroeder's entrepreneurial administration, several other prominent research groups joined the Life Span Institute, making it one of the largest and most respected research and development centers on disabilities and human development in the world with $15.6 million in grants in fiscal year 2000.

"Steve's background in experimental psychology and pharmacology enabled him to provide leadership to biomedical researchers and nurture a collaborative biobehavioral approach to the problems of development and disabilities," said Steven Warren, Life Span Institute director.

In his last year as Life Span Institute director, Schroeder saw the culmination of his life's work on behalf of people with self-injurious behavior: a groundbreaking five-year study of the drug risperidone, which holds great hope for people with this devastating problem. The study appears in the November issue of American Journal on Mental Retardation.

Helping people with self-injurious behavior has been a 30-year mission. When Schroeder was a young psychologist at the Murdoch Center in North Carolina, he met his first patient with this condition -- a young man who had gnawed his arm almost to the bone.

And for the past 11 years, Schroeder and his wife, Carolyn, KU adjunct professor of human development and family life, have given hands-on support to and raised funds for the Ann Sullivan Center in Lima, Peru. Their goal was to bring effective educational and clinical practices to the treatment of people with developmental disabilities in Latin America.

Schroeder's extensive work includes the soon-to-be-published book "Self-Injurious Behavior: Gene-Brain-Behavior Relationships." He has also been the editor of several premier disabilities-research journals, including the American Journal on Mental Retardation.

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