Dr. Kelly Lambert is Professor and Chair of the Psychology Department at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, VA. For two decades Dr. Lambert has divided her time between the classroom and laboratory. An award winning professor, she enjoys teaching courses such as Behavioral Neuroscience, Clinical Neuroscience, Psychobiology of Stress, and Comparative Animal Behavior.
In the laboratory, she and her students investigate two areas of research: (1) the enriching effects of parenting experience on brain and behavior and (2) effective coping strategies that build resilience against the toxic effects of chronic stress. Dr. Lambert has published her work in journals such as Nature, Scientific American, Scientific American MIND and Behavioral Neuroscience and she and her students have made over 100 presentations at neuroscience conferences across the world.
Her "smart rat moms" research (conducted with Craig Kinsley of the University of Richmond) has been focused on ABC's World News Tonight and has even been the subject of Jay Leno's monologue. In 2005, along with Kinsley, Lambert wrote a Clinical Neuroscience textbook for undergraduate students interested in learning more about the brain's role in mental health and mental illness.
As she was writing this text, Clinical Neuroscience: Neurobiological Foundations of Mental Health, she stumbled across a mental health mystery — that is, why depression rates continue to rise despite the multibillion dollar antidepressant industry. Her provocative solution to this mental mystery is the subject of Lifting Depression: A neuroscientist's hands-on approach to activating your brain's healing power.
