A section devoted to Profiles of Renown teachers and to the recognition and accomplishments of physiology teachers within the Society.

The highest honor within the Teaching of Physiology Section of the American Physiology Society (APS) is to be selected to present the Claude Bernard Lecture during the Experimental Biology Meetings. The 2010 recipient was Prof. Robert A. Bjork (Fig. 1), who currently is a Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) while being Director and a Principle Investigator at the UCLA Bjork Learning and Forgetting Laboratory. His presentation, “Making things hard on yourself, but in a good way: creating desirable difficulties to enhance learning,” was well received by an attentive audience and is being published in this issue of Advance in Physiology Education. In 1966, he received his PhD degree in Psychology from Stanford University with William K. Estes as his advisor. The title of his dissertation was “Learning and short-term retention of paired associates in relation to specific sequences of interpresentation intervals.” During the same year, he was a coauthor of a text entitled Problems in Mathematical Learning Theory, which used his BS degree in Mathematics obtained 5 yr earlier. Subsequently, he accepted an appointment at the University of Michigan, where he became active in the Human Performance Center and published extensively in psychological journals on subjects related to mathematical models and learning, learning of complex sequences, recall and forgetting, short-term memory, positive and directed forgetting, and longterm free recall. In 1974, he left Ann Arbor, MI, to accept a position as a Professor of Psychology at UCLA. It was at the Los Angles campus that Prof. Bjork received national and international recognition for his research achievements. His publications addressed the issues of learning assessment, learning during sleep, and learning acceleration plus topics related to knowledge retention and to the measurement of memory and metamemory. Moreover, information pertaining to inhibitory processes, thought suppression, unintentional forgetting, and induced forgetting were published. In addition, he addressed issues as enhancing human performance, improving motor skills, and the process of metacognition in motor learning. Prof. Bjork is acknowledged as an effective and influential classroom teacher, which was confirmed in 1992, when he received the Distinguished Teaching Award from UCLA. Not to be ignored were his publications that were directed toward teachers and their effectiveness in various classrooms. Specifically, articles were published on learning how to learn, when further learning fails, making claims in papers or talks, and analyzing information processing for college teachers. Beginning in 1972 and continued throughout his career, Prof. Bjork talents as an editor were recognized, and he has served as an Editor or a Coeditor for Cognitive Psychology, Memory and Cognition, Psychological Reviews, and Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Simultaneously were appointments as the Chair of The Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance for the National Research Council, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the panel for Cognition and Student Learning for the Institute of Educational Sciences, and Chair of the Council of Graduate Departments of Psychology. During his tenure as Chair of these various groups was his election as President of the American Psychological Association (2000 –2001). Honors have been intertwined with Prof. Bjork’s career, and they include The Distinguished Science Lecturer Award from the American Psychological Association, a Distinguished Service Award from the UCLA Department of Psychology, and, in 2008, the prestigious Distinguished Mentoring Award from the Academic Advancement Program of UCLA.