Bruno Klopfer Award 

The Bruno Klopfer Award is bestowed annually for outstanding, long-term professional contribution to scholarship in the field of personality assessment. The award honors a lifetime of active and impactful research related to personality assessment and psychological test development.

Meet the Bruno Klopfer Award Winner, Dr. John Kurtz!

Dr. John Kurtz is professor of psychology at Villanova University in suburban Philadelphia, where he has been a faculty member since 1996. He teaches courses in clinical psychology, personality theory, psychological testing, and the history of modern psychology. He is also a licensed psychologist in Pennsylvania since 1997, currently offering assessment and consultative services in reproductive medicine. Kurtz has been a member of the Society for Personality Assessment since 1991. He was Associate Editor of the Journal of Personality Assessment (JPA) from 2006 to 2013, and he has served on the editorial boards of JPA, Assessment, and Psychological Injury and Law. 

Kurtz attended the University of California at Berkeley, graduating with Honors in Psychology in 1987. At Berkeley, he worked with and was influenced by Harrison Gough and Bill Meredith. Following undergraduate studies, Kurtz was a research assistant in the Social Ecology Laboratory at Stanford University School of Medicine, where he was mentored by Rudolf Moos. At Stanford, he assisted with the development of clinical assessment instruments for a project examining alcohol use in older adults. He obtained his Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Vanderbilt University in 1994. At Vanderbilt, Kurtz was mentored by Leslie Morey and completed dissertation research on judgment biases and memory disturbances associated with borderline personality disorder. He also assisted with the construction, standardization, and initial validation studies of the Personality Assessment Inventory (PAI). Kurtz completed a clinical internship at the Department of Veterans Affairs and University of Michigan Medical Centers in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He was awarded a research training fellowship in rehabilitation research from the National Institutes of Health. The fellowship years allowed him to study personality factors in recovery and personality change following traumatic brain injury, collaborating with Steven Putnam at Wayne State University School of Medicine.

Dr. Kurtz’s research program has pursued diverse topics related to individual differences and problems of psychological assessment. He has conducted studies of the PAI, such as its utility in cases of traumatic brain injury and the validation of techniques designed to detect concealed psychopathology in selection contexts. He is also interested in alternative approaches to personality assessment, such as the advantages of using informant raters and the predictive validity of sentence completion and narrative techniques. Dr. Kurtz has an ongoing interest in stability and change in trait expression and the course of personality development during the young adult years.