About Us

Founded with the belief that healthy couples and strong families are the cornerstone of our society, the Relationship Institute at UCLA provides people from all walks of life with the information they need to understand and strengthen their relationships.

With support and funding from the National Institute of Health and National Science Foundation, we have spent decades researching relationships to understand how and why they change. Over the years, our work has been cited and used by hundreds of educators, agencies, psychologists, and mental health experts around the world.

Our mission is to share practical, research-based knowledge that serves individuals, couples, families and the greater community.

Director Biographies

Thomas Bradbury, Ph. D.

Thomas N. Bradbury earned a BA in psychobiology from Hamilton College, an MA in general psychology from Wake Forest University, and a PhD in clinical psychology from the University of Illinois. A Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, since 1990, Dr. Bradbury has published more than 150 scientific articles and has received awards for teaching, mentoring, and research. These awards include the Distinguished Early Career Award in 1998 from the American Psychological Association, the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2000 from the UCLA Department of Psychology, and an honorary academic degree, the Laurea Honoris Causa, in 2013 from Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy. Dr. Bradbury lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Cindy, a professor and clinical neuroscientist at UCLA. Together they have raised two children, Timothy and Nicholas.

Benjamin Karney, Ph.D.

Benjamin Karney is a Professor of Social Psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an adjunct behavioral scientist at the RAND Corporation. For the past 20 years, he has studied how intimate relationships, and marriages in particular, succeed and fail, publishing over 100 empirical papers and books on this topic. While on the faculty at University of Florida, Karney was the director and principle investigator of the Florida Project on Newlywed Marriage, a series of longitudinal studies examining the processes through which initially satisfying marriages either remain satisfying or deteriorate over time. In 2003, he conducted the baseline survey of marriage and families for the state of Florida as part of their initiative to support families. Since joining the faculty at UCLA in 2007, his ongoing studies have addressed how couples maintain intimacy in stressful environments, including research on military marriages funded by the Department of Defense and research on low-income newlyweds funded by the National Institute on Child Health and Human Development. Dr. Karney has twice been the recipient of the National Council on Family Relation's Reuben Hill Research and Theory Award for outstanding contributions to family science. He lives north of Los Angeles with his children, Daniella and Gabriel, and too many books.