World Congress Committee (1995 – 2019)

The tradition of holding World Congresses in Cognitive and Behavior Therapy goes back to 1980 when a World Congress of Behavior Therapy was organized in Jerusalem and was followed by Congresses in Washington, USA (1983), Edinburgh, Scotland (1988) and the Gold Coast, Australia 1992. During this time the International Association of Cognitive Psychotherapies (IACP) also organized the World Cognitive Therapy Congresses in Umea, Sweden (1986), Oxford (1989) and Toronto (1992).

It was the experience of running two separate world congresses in 1992 which had considerable overlap that led to the decision to host combine the two meetings and for the 1995 World Congress in Copenhagen to be called the 1st World Congress of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies with David Clark (UK) chairing the scientific committee for the cognitive arm and Lars Goran Ost (Sweden) chairing the one for behavior therapy. During this meeting the World Congress Committee (WCC) was formed on 15th July 1995 and continued to meet on an annual basis chaired by Juan Preciado (ABCT) to 1998, Art Nezu (ABCT) to 2005, Kim Halford (AABCT) to 2009, Steven Hayes (ABCT) to 2010 and since then by Sarah Egan. Our thanks go to all those WCC members who have worked over the past 24 years to ensure the effective planning of world congresses and their role in promoting the dissemination of evidence-based principles and practice of cognitive and behavioral therapies

Last World Congress Committee in Washington, November 2018
From left to right: Keith Dobson (Canada), Lata K. McGinn (USA), Mehmet Sungur (Turkey), Andreas Veith (Germany),
Jung Hye-Kwon (South Korea), Rod Holland (UK), Luis Perez Flores (Peru), Thomas Kalpakoglou (Greece),
Not shown Lynne McFarr (USA), Sarah Egan and Ross Menzies (Australia).