Dr. William A Banks attended medical school at University of MO-Columbia and is currently the Associate Chief of Staff for Research and Development at the Puget Sound VA. His work has focused on brain-body communication as mediated by the handling of peptides, regulatory proteins, and other informational molecules by the blood-brain barrier. He has applied this approach to studies of obesity/body weight regulation, Alzheimer’s disease/neurodegenerative diseases, neuroimmunology/neuroinflammation, CNS manifestations of diabetes mellitus, drug delivery to the CNS, and AIDS. He has also published on animal assisted therapy in nursing homes, robotics in geriatric medicine, sleep physiology, traumatic brain injury, and was first author on the paper first describing primary adrenal hyperplasia. He has received numerous awards, honors, and lectureships including the Middleton Award and the Normal Cousins Award is the past president of the Psychoneuroimmune Research Society. He has served or is currently on 20 editorial boards including Endocrinology; Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics; Brain, Behavior, and Immunity; Peptides; Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease; Experimental Biology and Medicine; Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism. He has delivered over 200 invited lectures at the national/international level, has over 500 non-abstract publications, over 30,000 Web of Science citations, and an H-index of 98.