Prof. Alice Medalia is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, and Director of Cognitive Health Services for the New York State Office of Mental Health. She is also a member of the Columbia University Academy of Clinical Excellence, and the founding director of the Lieber Recovery and Rehabilitation Clinic, a comprehensive psychiatric rehabilitation program for individuals with persistent mental illness. Prof. Medalia has been instrumental in raising awareness about the need to address cognition as a central aspect of health related to functional outcome. She brought the concept of cognitive health to the field of psychiatry and identified the need to treat cognition to understand how motivation and learning interact. She developed the widely used Neuropsychological Educational Approach to Remediation (NEAR) model of cognitive remediation, which has been disseminated worldwide. She is a NIMH-funded researcher, a prolific author, and the recipient of numerous awards for outstanding leadership in psychiatric rehabilitation.