Bruce McEwen Lifetime Achievement Award

The Bruce McEwen Lifetime Achievement Award recognizes lifetime contributions to psychoneuroendocrinology and related disciplines, honoring outstanding scientists whose work has advanced our understanding of brain-body interactions.

Renamed in 2020 in honor of psychoneuroendocrinology pioneer Bruce E. McEwen.

About the Award

The International Society of Psychoneuroendocrinology (ISPNE) has awarded the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award since 2000 to a distinguished line of outstanding scientists in the field of psychoneuroendocrinology. The award was renamed in 2020 to honor Bruce E. McEwen, a pioneer in psychoneuroendocrinology. Bruce McEwen himself received the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.

2026 Nominations Now Open

All ISPNE members are invited to submit nominations for the Bruce McEwen Lifetime Achievement Award. Nominations should include the nominee’s name and a brief statement of support.

The deadline for 2026 nominations is May 15, 2026.

Submit a Nomination

2026 Award Recipient

Dr. Clemens Kirschbaum has been awarded the 2026 Bruce McEwen Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society of Psychoneuroendocrinology (ISPNE). Since 2000, ISPNE has awarded the prestigious Lifetime Achievement Awards to a distinguished line of outstanding scientists in the field of psychoneuroendocrinology for their contributions to our understanding of brain-body interactions. In 2020, the award was renamed to honor PNE pioneer, Bruce E. McEwen, who is best known for his work on allostasis and allostatic load and who was himself awarded the lifetime achievement award in 2001. Dr. Kirschbaum is receiving this award through anonymous nomination and appointment from scholars in his field as well as ISPNE executive and awards committees to recognize a legacy of achievements in the field of Psychoneuroendocrinology. As part of this award, Dr. Kirschbaum will be presenting a plenary talk at the 2026 conference in Erlangen, Germany on September 4, 2026. It is with a happy nod that the ISPNE executive committee notes that Dr. Kirschbaum will receive this prestigious award in Germany as his 1993 paper on the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) made many Americans and other international scholars have to look up Trier to discover that excellent science was happening in Rhineland-Palatinate. Nominees noted, “[the TSST] is nowadays considered the gold standard in experimental stress research… It is fair to say that the TSST as of today is more famous than the Roman city gate Porta Nigra.” This particular American correspondent agrees as a google search was needed for Porta Nigra whereas the TSST is synonymous with the ubiquitous term Stress.

Dr. Kirschbaum received his PhD from the University of Trier in 1991 and completed habilitation at the University of Trier in 1996. After a short stint as a post-doc at the University of Rochester under the mentorship of David Felten MD PhD, Dr. Kirschbaum returned to the University of Trier as a faculty member, publishing the foundational 1993 paper that putatively gave birth to the modern inquiry about the mechanisms underlying stress reactivity and regulation in humans. In the 33 years and over 8500 citations since its publication, no other stressor has been as reliable and consistent as the TSST in evoking physiological stressreactivity. At more than one ISPNE meeting, and certainly not limited to the conferences that Dr. Kirschbaum organized in Dresden Germany in 2008, Miami USA in 2016, and Milan Italy in 2019, the ISPNE conference could be described as the International Study of the TSST with hundreds of scholars eager to understand the myriad ways that stress gets under the skin during acute challenges. It is also notable that Dr. Kirschbaum was quick to point out that the TSST began as an idea “back in my uni days” where he worked under the mentorship of Dirk Hellhammer at the Max Planck Institute in Münster. Dr. Kirschbaum notes, “Dirk was the quintessential supervisor and provider of all I needed to run the experiments and studies I had come up with. Trier was the hotspot of PNE in Germany for nearly 30 years, and I met many highly gifted students with whom I had the pleasure to work hard and play hard for many years. So grateful!” Many scholars would be tempted to conclude that Kirschbaum might have had something to do with that Germanic PNE origin story. It is likely that Dr. Kirschbaum would receive this award based on this 1993 contribution alone as nominators described this work as “canon” “foundational” “seminal” and “pioneering.” Yet, Dr. Kirschbaum went on as both an empirical driver of cutting-edge ideas and as a senior scientist mentoring the next generation of scholars who collectively made pioneering discoveries about the psychobiology of stress. In 1997, he and his PhD researcher Jens Prüßner described for the first time the Cortisol Awakening Response (CAR) using repeatedly collected salivary samples within the first hour after awakening. It was arguably Dr. Kirschbaum’s willingness to engage with salivary bioscience – another one of his pioneering ideas – that allowed this game-changing discovery about a basic physiological process to take place: lab-based blood collection at the convenience of practitioners would never be person-centered enough to value point of care testing so exquisitely time sensitive as to shift by orders of magnitude within minutes of awakening.

After some time at the University of Düsseldorf, Dr. Kirschbaum set up his lab at the Technische Universität Dresden where he served as Dean of the School of Science from 2014 to 2024. It was in Dresden that Dr. Kirschbaum continued pivotal basic work expanding the field’s range of stress biomarkers beyond the tried and tested cortisol until these other metrics were nearly as famous. With ISPNE president-elect Nicolas Rohleder, they characterized salivary alpha amylase as an indirect non-invasive marker of noradrenergic activity. Other biomarker validation also abounds – oxytocin, DHEA – but what stands out is that Dr. Kirschbaum did not repeat a formulaic predetermined path of validation of discovery for the biomarker of the year. Dr. Kirschbaum and colleagues’ corpus of work is a broad, innovative set of investigations that methodologically tackle psychobiological mechanisms in which each individual characteristic of a stress measure is probed and prodded until it revealed its own physiological profiles. The only thing formulaic is arguably the two formulas for calculating the area under the curve (AUCg and AUCi).

This commitment to scientific tinkering might not be surprising for someone who first set up a chemical lab in the basement of his parents’ house and who describes running a wet lab as having “all the freedom to play (with saliva and steroid hormones)”. The next notable laboratory in Dr. Kirschbaum’s career was a basement laboratory with stark tiled walls and an abundance of open shelves stacked with chemicals and SOPs. This was where Dr. Kirschbaum met his wife Angelika who worked “together door-to-door” for 38 years before retiring to “enjoy the freedom of life without committee meetings, teaching obligations, [and] the rat race for research money."  It was in Dresden that Dr. Kirschbaum, who nominators describe as having “the mark of a truemechanistic scientist”, once again pioneered a new direction that has turned the field of psychoneuroendocrinology on its head: quite literally. Dr. Kirschbaum and others proposed hair-cortisol as a cumulative index of HPA-axis functioning which allowed scholars in this field to understand the chronic wear and tear on the body that accumulates across months and into years. The match between hair cortisol and allostatic load – the concept pioneered by Bruce McEwen for whom this award is named – cannot be understated. Put another way, Bruce would be proud. And the feeling is mutual. Dr. Kirschbaum stated, “This award means a lot to me – not only because ISPNE has been the most important scientific society for me throughout my 40 years of work… It also reminds me of the wonderful role model, outstanding scientist and friend: Bruce.”

On the topic of the scientific society, ISPNE is incredibly grateful for Dr. Kirschbaum’s contributions to the field as well as the society. Dr. Kirschbaum served as president of the society and organized three conferences across three different countries. Nominators noted “everyone at ISPNE knows Clemens! He has been an active and highly instrumental member of the society for over 35 years.” Indeed, the executive committee for ISPNE created the service award in 2023 to recognize Dr. Kirschbaum’s efforts to advance ISPNE because, simply put, Dr. Kirschbaum saved the society. Thus, it is long overdue and well deserved that ISPNE recognizes the tremendous contribution to the field of psychoneuroendocrinology by awarding the Bruce McEwen award to Dr. Clemens Kirschbaum.

Previous Lifetime Achievement Award Winners