Professor James P. McCullough, Jr. is a widely respected psychologist, academic and educator. He is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at the Virginia Commonwealth University, where he served on the faculty for 47 years. Much of his career has been dedicated to the diagnostic criteria for depression.

Chief among Professor McCullough's achievements is his research participation in the diagnostic disengagement of chronic depression from acute/episodic major depression in the American Psychiatric Association's fifth edition of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM 5). He helped in the establishment of the new category of depression labeled as Persistent Depressive Disorder (PDD) or dysthymia.

Professor McCullough also developed the world's only therapy model explicitly designed to treat PDD, the Cognitive Behavioral Analysis System of Psychotherapy (CBASP).

Professor McCullough has written extensively about CBASP, and his research has been published in many esteemed scientific journals, including Psychotherapy, American Journal of Psychotherapy, New England Journal of Medicine, Clinical Psychology, Behavioral Medicine, European Journal of Psychotherapy, Psychiatry, and Psychiatric Clinics of North America.