Albert “Skip” Rizzo is a clinical psychologist and Director of Medical VR at the University of Southern California Institute for Creative Technologies. He is also a Research Professor with the USC Dept. of Psychiatry and School of Gerontology. Over the last 25 years, Skip has conducted research on the design, development and evaluation of Virtual Reality systems targeting the areas of clinical assessment, treatment, and rehabilitation across the domains of psychological, cognitive and motor functioning in both healthy and clinical populations. This work has focused on PTSD, TBI, Autism, ADHD, Alzheimer’s disease, stroke and other clinical conditions. He has also driven an extensive research program on the use of intelligent virtual human agents for clinical training, healthcare information support, and clinical assessment. In spite of the diversity of these clinical R&D areas, the common thread that drives all of his work with digital technologies involves the study of how Virtual Reality simulations can be usefully applied to human healthcare beyond what’s possible with traditional 20th Century methods.
Stéphane Bouchard holds the Canada Research Chair in Clinical cyberpsychology and teaches psychotherapy and cyberpsychology at the Université du Québec en Outaouais in Canada As a scientist-practitioner, his current research projects involve developing virtual environments to treat complex anxiety disorders and pathological gambling, leading randomized control trials on the efficacy of in virtuo exposure for mental health disorders, and conducting experimental studies to understand to why virtual reality is an effective treatment tool. Another prolific area of expertise is telepsychotherapy, where he conducts randomized control trials and processes studies on the efficacy of delivering cognitive-behavior therapy in videoconference. His research lab holds Psyche, the only six-sided total immersion virtual reality system dedicated to mental health research. He has received for more than 12 million dollars in research funding, has published more than 150 scientific articles and book chapters, delivered hundreds of scientific communications around the world and is actively collaborating with researchers from around the globe. He is also the president of Cliniques and Development In Virtuo, as company that distributes virtual environments to mental health professionals.