Thomas Ritz PhD

Thomas Ritz, Ph.D. is a Professor of Psychology at SMU. He received his Ph.D. and Habilitation (including venia legend) degrees from the University of Hamburg in Germany, taught at the University of Kiel, Germany, and held positions as a post-doctoral research fellow at Stanford University and the University of London, UK.

Dr. Ritz is the Director of the Psychobiology of Emotion, Stress, and Chronic Disease Research program at SMU. He is a past recipient of the Award for Distinguished Early Contributions to Psychophysiology by the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR) and was the Past President of the International Society for the Advancement of Respiratory Psychophysiology (ISARP). He has served on various committees of scientific societies and editorial boards of academic journals, as past Associate Editor of the journal Behavior Therapy, and currently as Associate Editor for Biological Psychology. His research has been funded generously by private donors and federal agencies, in particular, the National Institutes of Health (currently with three major awards for studies in the behavioral medicine of asthma and for the treatment of anhedonia), for which he has also functioned as an ad-hoc reviewer and permanent member of the Behavioral Medicine Interventions and Outcome (BMIO) study section. He has published more than 135 peer-reviewed articles and book chapters, one book, and one co-edited book. ​

Dr. Ritz’s major areas of research are in the psychobiology of respiration and the airways, behavioral medicine of respiratory disease, and autonomic function in anxiety and depression, with both basic research and translational treatment studies. His laboratory is specialized in electrophysiology, respiration, and exhaled gas and breath analysis. In longstanding collaborations with colleagues in medical schools (the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Baylor University Medical Center) and SMU Departments of Biology and Chemistry he has also implemented brain imaging, endocrinology, and immunology techniques in his research.