Director's Page

Richard J. Servatius, Ph.D.

Rick Servatius is the Director of the SMBI, Associate Professor in the Department of Neurology & Neuroscience and Director of the NeuroBehavioral Research Laboratory (NBRL) at the New Jersey Health Care System (NJHCS). An experimental psychologist at heart, Rick received a Master's degree in Experimental Psychology from State University of New York, College at Cortland in 1989. Upon leaving, Rick was the first graduate student admitted into a fledgling Ph.D. program in Neuroscience at NJMS — and the first to graduate from the program in 1993.

During this time Rick became involved with the Pavlovian Society through the prompting of one of his mentor's Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D. The Pavlovian Society represented an eclectic group of researchers and clinicians. The tenets of the Pavlovian Society encapsulated and crystallized Rick's orientation toward research - an integration of physiological and behavioral endpoints to understand normal and abnormal function. This drive brought Rick to do his postdoctoral training with Tracey J. Shors (then at Princeton University). Expanding stress research into understanding the impact of traumatic stressors on classical conditioning, Tracey and Rick even had an experiment slated to be performed in Neurolab, a shuttle mission by NASA dedicated to Neuroscience (unfortunately, circumstance prevented the execution of the experiment). Rick was offered a position within the NJHCS and NJMS in 1995 to direct research efforts toward understanding the origin of unexplained illness in Gulf War veterans as Associate Director of Research for the Gulf War Research Center. The position reunited Rick with Ben and John Ottenweller, his graduate mentors. In 2003 Rick began an association with the Army Research Engineering Development Center (ARDEC) at nearby Picatinny Arsenal in Northern New Jersey. While the interests of ARDEC were off center of Rick's research program, the acute needs of ARDEC to further National interests was compelling. The ARDEC collaboration led to the establishment of the SMBI in 2002.

Rick saw the SMBI serving two mutually supportive purposes: 1) provide ARDEC and DoD with neurobehavioral expertise, 2) organize collaborative efforts toward understanding stress-related mental and physical illness. In fact 2002 was a particularly good year in that Rick was awarded the Career Scientist designation by the VA and the Pavlovian Society's Investigator Award. Currently, Rick is a graduate faculty member of the Graduate School of Biomedical Science of NJMS, the Integrative Neuroscience Program in conjunction with the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience (CMBN) of Rutgers University, Newark, the Biomedical Engineering Program in conjunction with the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), a mentor of Master's students from Seton Hall University (Department of Biology and Psychology) , and a mentor for talented senior high school students from Bergen County Academies. Rick also serves on the Editorial Board of Integrative Physiological and Behavioral Sciences, the Pavlovian Society's Journal.