EC Member Highlight: Member-At-Large for Continuing Education (CE) Kevin Harris

Continuing on with introducing our Executive Committee of 2026 members, say hello to our Continuing Education (CE) Member-At-Large:

Dr. Kevin Harris!

Dr. Kevin Harris

What is your role within EC this year? What do you do? How and when did you hear about BCPA for the first time and how did you end up as an EC member and in your current role?

This year, I am serving as the Continuing Education Member-At-Large for BCPA. My role is to search for good continuing education opportunities for BCPA members for Workshops and Lunch & Learns. I am currently collecting a list of the areas of expertise of local psychologists so that we can ask for local experts to present on various topics of interest to psychologists, so if anyone has any ideas, please send them my way! I first heard about BCPA shortly after I moved to San Antonio in 2018 and joined in 2019 because I thought it would be a good way to get involved in my new community. I served as the Early Career Member-At-Large for a few years before serving as Membership Member-At-Large, President-Elect, President, Past President, and then Secretary. (I also served as acting Treasurer for a short time when the position was vacant.) I guess I just really like being involved in BCPA!

What is your favorite research area/training method/publication/etc. within psychology at the moment? Tell us about an interesting article that you read recently that you would like to share with others.

I am presenting a Lunch & Learn on presurgical psychological assessment for bariatric surgery, and I also do presurgical evaluations for spinal cord stimulator surgeries, so I enjoy health psychology topics and anything that has to do with neurology, neuropsychology, and neurocognitive issues. I just listened to a fascinating podcast this morning from a neurogastroenterologist about the gut-brain connection and learned that 80% of the information in the vagus nerve travels not from the brain to the gut but from the gut to the brain. I am fascinated by the mind-body connection. I am also perennially interested in the psychology of religion and spirituality and have a new book that I co-edited that will be released later this year: Measures of Religiosity and Spirituality, edited by Peter Hill, Ralph Hood, Jonathan Jong, and myself, published by Springer.

Tell me something else about you that all should know, or would be interesting!

I first became interested in psychology after meeting one of my oldest friends who has Tourette's Disorder. He is very bright and used to doodle neurotransmitters in his notebook, such as how serotonin breaks down into different compounds and would act on his brain. Speaking of the mind-body connection, I was fascinated by how many medications would not work for him, but when he listened to certain kinds of music -- or when he performed on stage as an actor -- his vocal and motor tics would just go away for a time. At about the same time in my life (as a teenager), my father was diagnosed with Bipolar II Disorder, and I dated a girl who was diagnosed with what they called at the time Process Schizophrenia. I think that's probably why I ended up going into the field of psychology.