On August 13, 2025, we lost one of our brightest stars, Robert (“Bob”) M. Bilder, Ph.D., far too soon. Bob possessed a unique blend of creativity, innovative expression, scientific rigor, humor and kindness. He was the Michael E. Tennenbaum Distinguished Family Chair in Creativity Research, Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry, and Chief of the Psychology Division at UCLA. Bob was co-founder of the UCLA Semel Healthy Campus Initiative Center and the Tennenbaum Center for the Biology of Creativity. Bob was a Fellow of ACNP and was accepted into membership in 2008. Bob earned his BA in Biology and Psychology from Columbia University in 1978, followed by a Ph.D. in Psychology with a specialization in human neuropsychology from City College, City University of New York in 1984. Before joining UCLA in 2002, he held prominent faculty appointments at Columbia University College of Physicians & Surgeons and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, serving as Chief of Neuropsychology at Zucker Hillside Hospital and Associate Director for Human Research at the Center for Advanced Brain Imaging at the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research.

Bob’s career is very difficult to define due to the remarkable vastness of its breadth. Yet to each of his many areas of inquiry he brought extraordinary intellectual vision, boundless curiosity, and an unwavering commitment to principled, scientific excellence. A pioneer in neuropsychology for 40 years, Dr. Bilder’s groundbreaking work in schizophrenia, brain-behavior relationships, phenomics, creativity, and human cognition provided significant advancement to several fields of inquiry and clinical science. Perhaps his greatest contribution to scientific exploration, however, was his relentless and incisive drive to challenge any acceptance of common and false wisdom. Bob was fascinated with innovative technologies, and through his career assessed the validity of new methodologies. He was one of the early adopters of MRI and fMRI technologies. He led the field not only in terms of the application of these tools to schizophrenia, and later to creativity research, but made major contributions to the refinement of these technologies in highly disciplined MR technology journals. He also developed a variety of novel assessment methods, being one of the first to adopt computerized cognitive assessments, and later establishing methods for remote cognitive assessment that were utilized broadly during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Bob’s early work at Columbia University, NY Psychiatric Institute, and Hillside Hospital focused on the neuropsychological and neuroanatomical deficits of schizophrenia, especially in patients with particularly poor social and functional outcomes. As a young investigator, he was the first to demonstrate a relationship between cognitive impairment and symptom clusters in patients with schizophrenia. Since then, over 1000 papers have replicated his seminal report. He was also the first to characterize the profile of neuropsychological impairment in patients with first-episode psychosis.

Bob was also one of the first to examine the effects of various treatments on cognition in patients with schizophrenia, including the impact of standard antipsychotic treatment as well as complementary experimental treatment with potentially cognitive enhancing medications. Throughout his career, Bob provided key expertise to academic and industry partners engaged in clinical studies, from small experimental medicine studies to large clinical trials.

In 2007, Bob spearheaded a transformative, NIH-funded Roadmap Initiative at UCLA, the Consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics, which brought together a multidisciplinary team of investigators across the campus to serve as an international resource for the systematic characterization of neuropsychiatric phenotypes and their analysis on a genome-wide scale. This project was groundbreaking in its effort to bridge basic, clinical and information sciences to facilitate discovery of the genetic and environmental bases of human behavioral variation. The data collected are publicly available, and remain widely used by researchers around the world. Bob was uniquely well suited to lead this effort, given his inspiring vision, ability to bring people together with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.

At UCLA, Bob initiated a series of studies on the biology of creativity, utilizing a wide range of methods, including in-depth interviews, cognitive and personality assessments, and brain imaging techniques to study exceptionally creative visual artists, musicians and scientists. His work had begun to map the global network functional architecture associated with creativity.

Bob played a central and visionary role in the creation and growth of the National Neuropsychology Network (NNN). The project began in March of 2019 with what many thought at the time was an over-ambitious goal to enroll more than ten thousand participants to clarify the latent constructs underlying many of the most widely used neuropsychological tests. These analyses opened the door to new, more efficient ways of measuring cognition, including the development of computerized adaptive tests and improved psychometric foundations, especially when working across different racial, ethnic, and language groups. The continuation of the NNN reflects the strength of the foundation he helped build. The NNN stands as one of the clearest reflections of his ability to see beyond the limitations of the moment and to inspire others to join in building something larger than any one individual or lab.

A diplomate of the American Board of Clinical Neuropsychology, Bob was a sought after and dedicated mentor and supervisor with an infectious passion for teaching excellence in the clinical endeavor equal to that of scientific inquiry. Over the course of his career, he helped to train and inspire hundreds of students who went on to be the next generation of clinical neuropsychologists with the very highest standards. He was honored in 2024 by the International Neuropsychological Society with a Lifetime Achievement Award that recognized him for the lifelong breadth of scope to his work that proved transformative to the field of neuropsychology.

Outside of academia, Bob shared with friends and colleagues his joyful spirit, remarkable wit and dry humor, as well as his love of wine, food, and music. He loved to entertain, and his meat cooking skills are legendary. Bob had a particular love for progressive jazz fusion and was an exceptionally talented bass guitar player. He performed frequently with friends, effortlessly crossing many genres.

A deeply devoted husband and father, Bob’s greatest source of joy was his family. He never missed an opportunity to share pride for his wife, Debbie, and children, Leo and Alexandra. The loving and bright spirit he brought to his family will live on for generations to come, including with his sister Cindy Bilder-Caminiti, and her husband Jeff Caminiti, and all of his larger extended family.