Skip Rizzo Named Associate Director for Medical Virtual Reality at ICT

In a newly created position, Dr. Albert “Skip” Rizzo will be responsible for advancing and overseeing the use of virtual reality and game technology in a wide range of medical domains for training, therapy, diagnostics and other forms of intervention.
Beginning with his work using a virtual classroom presented through a head-mounted display that could help diagnose children with attention deficit disorder, Skip has been a leader in using virtual reality for clinical purposes.  More recently, Skip’s efforts to use VR for post-traumatic stress disorder therapy have led to very promising results where roughly 75% of patients receiving the therapy became sub-clinical at therapy completion.  This effort received an award at the Laval VR conference and was the subject of a story in the New Yorker magazine.  Skip is also one of the principal investigators on the SimCoach project, which will provide information and resources to returning veterans and their families who are experiencing post-deployment problems.