Robert L. Spitzer

Robert L. Spitzer is a psychiatrist who spent most of his career as a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute. He is best known as the principal architect of the DSM-III, published in 1980, which introduced systematic, criteria-based diagnosis to psychiatry and fundamentally transformed the field's diagnostic framework. He also led the effort in 1973 to remove homosexuality from the DSM's list of mental disorders. He passed away on December 25, 2015, in Seattle, Washington.