Dr. Amen is a physician, psychiatrist, teacher, and four-time New York Times bestselling author. He is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on applying brain imaging science to clinical psychiatric practice. He is a board-certified child and adult psychiatrist and a Distinguished Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association. He is the medical director of Amen Clinics, Inc., in Newport Beach and San Francisco, California; Bellevue, Washington; and Reston, Virginia. Amen Clinics has the world’s largest database of functional brain scans related to behavior, totaling more than seventy thousand scans. The clinics have seen patients from ninety countries.
Dr. Amen is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry and human behavior at the University of California Irvine School of Medicine. He is widely regarded as a gifted teacher, taking complex concepts in neuropsychiatry, neuroimaging, and brain health to make them easily accessible to other professionals and the general public.
Dr. Amen is the lead researcher on the world’s largest brain imaging/brain rehabilitation study on professional football players, which not only demonstrated significant brain damage in a high percentage of retired players but also the possibility for rehabilitation in many with the principles that underlie his work.
Under the direction of Pastor Rick Warren, Dr. Amen together with Drs. Mark Hyman and Mehmet Oz, is one of the chief architects of Saddleback Church’s Daniel Plan, a fifty-two-week program to get churches healthy, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.
Dr. Amen is the author of forty-five professional articles; the coauthor of the chapter “Functional Imaging in Clinical Practice” in the Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry; and the author of twenty-eight books, including Change Your Brain, Change Your Life; Magnificent Mind at Any Age; Change Your Brain, Change Your Body; and The Amen Solution. He is also the author of Healing ADD, Making a Good Brain Great, and Healing the Hardware of the Soul, and coauthor of Unchain Your Brain, Healing Anxiety and Depression, and Preventing Alzheimer’s.
Dr. Amen is the producer and star of six highly popular shows about the brain, which have raised more than thirty-five million dollars for public television.
A small sample of the organizations Dr. Amen has spoken for includes the National Security Agency; the National Science Foundation; Harvard’s Learning and the Brain Conference; Franklin Covey; the Million Dollar Roundtable; the National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges; and the Supreme Courts of Delaware, Ohio, and Wyoming. Dr. Amen’s work has been featured in Newsweek, Parade magazine, the New York Times Magazine, Men’s Health, and Cosmopolitan.
Dr. Amen is married to Tana; he is the father of four children and grandfather to Elias, Julian, Angelina, Emmy, and Liam. He is an avid table tennis player.