M. David Rudd, Ph.D., ABPP received his undergraduate degree from Princeton University and his master's and doctoral degrees from the University of Texas-Austin. He also completed two years of post-doctoral training at the Beck Institute under the direction of Aaron T. Beck, M.D. As a licensed and board-certified clinical psychologist, he served on the medical staff for tertiary care medical centers for fifteen years before returning to academia full-time, with a decade at Baylor Scott & White, and a corresponding tenured faculty appointment at Texas A&M College of Medicine. He was the director of psychology at Baylor Scott & White, serving both outpatient and inpatient services and taught introductory psychiatry courses for Texas A&M College of Medicine, along with providing supervision for interns, residents, and fellows in psychiatry, family practice, and emergency medicine. He also served as the director of the PsyD clinical psychology program at Baylor University. He has served at every academic leadership level, including as a department chair at multiple universities, dean, and provost at Baylor, Texas Tech, the University of Utah, and most recently as president of the University of Memphis for almost a decade. Since transitioning from the presidency, he now serves as a distinguished university professor of psychology and directs the Rudd Institute for Veteran and Military Suicide Prevention and the Clinical Risk, Resilience and Intervention Lab, endowed by the University of Memphis Board of Trustees and private donors.  As a clinical scientist, he has established a global name, with an H-index of 74, an i-10 index of 152, almost 22,000 citations and is consistently ranked among the top .05% of researchers in suicide prevention, treatment and assessment globally.