Martha Banks

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Martha E. Banks (born July 1951) is a retired clinical psychologist and research neuropsychologist who also works as a computer programmer at ABackans DCP Inc. She studies how gender, race, trauma, disability, religion, and other identities intersect and affect people’s lives. Banks helped start the Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues, which became the American Psychological Association’s Division 45, Society for the Psychological Study of Culture, Ethnicity and Race. She also led the Society for the Psychology of Women as president from 2008 to 2009 and served as Division Representative to the APA Council in 2012. She chaired the APA Committee on Women in 1997 and was on the APA Board for the Advancement of Psychology in the Public Interest.

Banks was born in Washington, D.C., and grew up in Newport, Rhode Island. She earned a B.S. from Brown University in 1973, then an M.A. in 1978 and a Ph.D. in clinical psychology in 1980 from the University of Rhode Island. Her dissertation was Emotions and Music: A Correlational Study.

She worked as a psychologist at the Brecksville Veterans Administration Hospital from 1983 to 1996 and taught at the College of Wooster from 1989 to 1991 and again from 2003 to 2005. Her research focuses on women with disabilities and their higher risk of abuse, including traumatic brain injuries from domestic violence. With Rosalie Ackerman, she helped create the Ackerman-Banks Neuropsychological Battery, one of the first tests to include an ethnic minority normative sample, and the Post-Assault Traumatic Brain Injury Interview and Checklist.

Banks has won several awards, including the Sue Rosenberg Zalk Award for Distinguished Service to the Society for the Psychology of Women (2003), a Presidential Citation for Leadership from the APA (2008), and the APA Committee on Women in Psychology Distinguished Leadership Award (2012). As a URI alumna, she received the President’s Distinguished Achievement Award in 2010 and the University Diversity Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2013.