Sharon Wilsnack wins Extraordinary Woman Award

Sharon Wilsnack, neuroscience, a widely recognized authority on alcoholism and other substance abuse, was recently honored by the Women’s Fund with its “Extraordinary Woman” award. The Women’s Fund is an endowment of the Community Foundation of Grand Forks. Wilsnack and her husband Richard, a sociologist, form a team that’s been working on alcoholism and related problems for the better part of 30 years.

In the introduction to the group’s program for its Women with Heart awards event, chairwoman Julie Rygg said that three women chosen for this year’s award—including Wilsnack—“have given much of themselves to help make a better life for so many in our area.”

The UND School of Medicine and Health Sciences (SMHS) tribute to Wilsnack reads, in part, “Your scientific studies of how the disease of alcoholism uniquely affects women have led to effective treatment and prevention programs.”

Wilsnack, a Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of Clinical Neuroscience, received her B.A. from Kansas State University, and her M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Harvard University. She studied as a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Freiburg, Germany.

Wilsnack’s background includes experience as a substance abuse therapist and treatment program director as well as in research and medical education. She has published extensively on issues related to substance abuse in women, and has addressed numerous national and international audiences, including several seminal books in the field of alcoholism. Her research has been funded continuously since 1980 by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (part of the National Institutes of Health), a remarkable achievement in the highly competitive world of scientific research.

Wilsnack and her husband and research partner Richard direct a 20-year longitudinal study of drinking behavior in U.S. women, and coordinate an international collaborative research project on gender and alcohol which involves researchers from more than 40 countries.

Wilsnack is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. She served as a member of the Institute of Medicine’s Committee to Study Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, as a member of the National Advisory Council on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism/National Institutes of Health, and on numerous other boards and advisory groups concerned with alcohol abuse and women’s health. She was a member and panel chair of the NIAAA Task Force on College Drinking and a member of the Center for Substance Abuse Treatment’s Treatment Improvement Protocol (TIP) Consensus Panel on Special Needs of Women in Substance Abuse Treatment.

Wilsnack has been invited to numerous conferences, scientific meetings, and many other venues around the world to deliver presentations about alcoholism, how it affects women and girls, college binge drinking, and related topics.