Wendy Heller is a professor in the Psychology Department and a faculty affiliate of the Neuroscience Program, the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, Carle Illinois College of Medicine, and the Institute for Sustainability, Energy and Environment.  She serves as Executive Associate Dean for Social and Behavioral Sciences and Area Centers in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and past president of the Society for Research in Psychopathology. She has published over 150 scholarly articles and has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health throughout her career. A clinical psychologist, her research integrates neuropsychological, developmental, and social/personality factors to understand the impact of anxiety and depression on cognition and emotion. She pioneered a neuropsychological perspective on anxiety as a dimensional phenomenon and showed that different types of anxiety have unique associations with cognitive function and dysfunction.

Promoting a more inclusive academy and addressing inequities related to gender, race, ethnicity, and ability status are also central to Heller’s contributions. In 2010 she received the Larine Y. Cowan Make a Difference Award in recognition of two decades of promoting diversity and inclusion at the department, college, campus, and national levels. Since 2013 she has been a member or chair of the campus DRIVE (Diversity Realized at Illinois by Visioning Excellence) committee, building an inclusive faculty. In 2014-2015, she served as a Provost Fellow for campus diversity initiatives. As Presidential Fellow of the University of Illinois System from January 2022 through January 2023, she led the Gender Inclusive Leadership Project, and she continues to provide leadership as special assistant to the system’s executive vice president and vice president for academic affairs.

Heller was selected for the President’s Leadership Program in 2019-2020 and was a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project in 2021-2022. She served as director of clinical training of the clinical/community program for over a decade and as head of the Psychology Department from 2015-2021. In 2019 she was awarded the Executive Officer Distinguished Leadership Award by the University of Illinois, and in 2021 she received the LAS Impact Award for demonstrating a spirit of service and sacrifice that went beyond expectations to serve our community during the COVID-19 crisis.

Education

• B.A., spanish, University of Pennsylvania

• B.A., psychology, University of Pennsylvania

• Ph.D., biopsychology, University of Chicago

• 1985-1987: NIMH Postdoctoral Research Fellowship Award

• 1991-1993: NIMH Individual Faculty Scholar Award

• 2009: Fellow of the American Psychological Society (APS)

• 2010: Larine Y. Cowan Make a Difference Award

Neuropsychological research has demonstrated that not only are different regions of the brain specialized for different cognitive functions, they also differ in the role they play in emotional processing. Areas of the brain that are involved in information processing are thus, concurrently and in a complementary manner, engaged in a variety of emotional processes, which may influence or interact with cognition at various stages of the learning or memory process. Heller's research focuses on examining how activity and function of different brain regions influences cognitive, emotional, and social functioning and their implications for depression and anxiety. Her studies combine experimental paradigms from cognitive psychology with behavioral measures such as performance on neuropsychological tasks and measures of central nervous system activity such as EEG/ERPs and fMRI.

Heller’s work focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms that implement emotional processing and experience and on applying these models to understanding the cognitive and emotional characteristics of psychopathology, especially mood and anxiety disorders.  She uses neuropsychological and neuroimaging techniques such as fMRI to identify neural subsystems that are spatially and functionally distinct and that are involved in implementing unique constellations of both emotional and cognitive processes. Our work has shown that depression is associated with deficits in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a brain region involved in the ability to modulate top-down attentional processing. This may be the source of difficulties in concentration and efficient task performance in depression. However, it appears that different types of anxiety interact differently with brain activity in this region, which has implications for the development of cognitive problems in depression. We have provided compelling evidence for different patterns of brain activity associated with each of two types of anxiety: anxious apprehension (verbal rumination, worry) and anxious arousal (intense fear and/or panic). The nature of cognitive processing in mood and anxiety disorders appears to depend on the degree to which these different dimensions of depression and anxiety are present. Our work showcases state of the art approaches that have been identified as crucial in developing a novel classification of mental disorders (see Hyman, 2007, Nature Reviews/Neuroscience). In addition, we pioneered a  dimensional approach in the context of a cognitive neuroscience investigation of  psychopathology (Gray, 2002). Our work has contributed significantly to the effort to identify an endophenotype for depression (Bruder et al., 2007, Biological Psychiatry). Our findings are relevant not only for understanding severe mental disorders. We have observed the same patterns in nonclinical populations (e.g. college students) with mild levels of depression and anxiety. Therefore, our results help to elucidate the role of cognition/emotion interactions in risk and vulnerability to more serious disorders of psychopathology.  Heller’s more recent work has examined individual differences in personality (e.g., schizotypy), motivation (e.g., approach/avoidance temperament), attachment, and executive function, and their relationship to brain function and psychopathology.