"I really appreciate [the National Center's] collaborative stance. Their scientists and clinicians have an openness to collaboration that has allowed our group and others to establish ongoing relationships that are personally and professionally rewarding.

"We are on the DOD side, so we cover the Active Duty component; the National Center is concerned with veterans. Sometimes it's a challenge getting the systems to work together, ensuring continuity of care from the battlefront to the home front, moving people through the system. These are continuing, ongoing challenges.

"The present war remains a challenge in care for veterans. It has especially highlighted the relationship between PTSD and TBI [traumatic brain injury], so we now have an opportunity to learn more about the relationships between these two problems."

"One of the strengths of the National Center is their collaboration with people in universities and other VA settings throughout the country. And their generosity, their willingness to share their knowledge, to mentor, to teach, to train. It's an amazing organization, and one that has benefited so many veterans and others.

"I've collaborated over the years with people at just about all the sites. We have had a wonderful relationship between Center for Child Traumatic Stress and the National Center for PTSD. One example is the development of "Psychological First Aid," which was a very important development in providing services to populations affected by major disasters.

"The collaborations I've had with National Center staff have been among the most rewarding of my professional career."

"The National Center has become the flagship agency throughout the world in terms of addressing the problem of PTSD from a number of perspectives. If you talk to people around the world and ask them what is the absolute best resource for clinical practice, research, education, on PTSD, more people than not would identify the National Center.

"What the National Center has done is recruit some of the very top clinicians and scholars and educators to focus on the myriad problems that PTSD produces, how to treat it, how to provide families and sufferers with information about it. Their primary mission has been to do so from the VA context, and we can identify many things they've done in the VA that have made a huge difference. But the impact of the National Center really transcends their work with VA.

"It's been a pleasure for me personally and professionally to have had the opportunity to work with such an incredibly collaborative, high caliber, collegial group of people."