Most graduate students celebrate the news that they have passed their comprehensive exams by hoisting a few cold ones with friends and fellow students. Larry James (PhD ’87), however, celebrated his University of Iowa educational rite of passage by hoisting all his statistics textbooks and class notes over the railing of the Iowa River bridge into the water below.

“I loved my time at Iowa,” recalls James, who now is chair of the Department of Psychology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., “but I hated statistics. I knew I was going to be a clinical psychologist and was convinced that statistics and research design were useless and irrelevant.”

James did, indeed, become a clinician and along the way achieved the rank of colonel in the United States Army and became the psychology consultant for the U.S. Army North Atlantic Medical Command, an administrative region that stretches from North Carolina to central New York. But far from leaving statistics and research behind, he regularly conducts assessment of Army treatment programs, annually publishes several peer-reviewed research articles, and is awaiting the imminent publication of his second book.

After earning his doctoral degree, James attended officer basic training—graduating at the top of his class—and received a military commission. Early in his career, James focused on forensic psychology, an interest sparked by his graduate work at Iowa where he developed a typology of child molesters at the Oakdale Medical Classification Center. Eventually, he broaden his focus, and since completing a post-doctoral fellowship in 1995, his research and clinical practice have concentrated on behavioral psychology.

“We try to help patients with chronic diseases like diabetes and migraine headaches deal with pain without medication,” James says. “We also help treat patients with conditions like obesity and high blood pressure to better manage those conditions through behavior modification.”

Such treatment requires repeat visits with the psychology staff, however, and while serving as chief psychologist at Tripler Army Medical Center in Hawaii, James became frustrated with the vast geographic extent of his practice. Patients who needed regular contacts with a psychologist would be flown in for short-term treatment and then returned to their military base. Using his research and clinical experience as a springboard, James developed a better, far-ranging treatment delivery system through the creative use of some relatively low bandwidth telemedicine technology.

“We developed a virtual pain clinic by using standard and inexpensive video and teleconferencing devices available at the local electronics store,” James says. “I can see and talk to patients from halfway around the world who can see and talk to me. I think of the clinic as the Volkswagen bus of telemedicine.”

Although James says he wouldn’t recommend this approach for patients with serious mental illnesses, it is extremely effective with patients who are learning behavior techniques to manage pain without medication. Colleagues and patients scattered around the globe recognize his clinical programs as effective and innovative.

“Dr. James has established the standard for what it is to be a scientist-practitioner psychologist in the U.S. Army,” says Jay Earles, director of training at the Eisenhower Army Medical Center’s Clinical Psychology Residency Program in Ft. Gordon (Augusta), Georgia. “His limitless energy and vision have transformed the clinical services provided to military service members and their families.”

James says that he was fortunate to attend Iowa’s Counseling Psychology program because it was strong in clinical training. But he’s also come to be particularly grateful that his training in research design, statistics, and grant writing was not jettisoned along with his textbooks the day he passed his comprehensive exams.

“I don’t think any of my College of Education professors,” James says, “would have predicted that I’d eventually be doing peer-review research and sitting on dissertation committees—and loving it.” –by Jean Florman