Stephen Rollnick is Honorary Distinguished Professor in the School of Medicine, Cardiff University, Wales, UK.
Since then he has lived and worked there as a clinical psychologist in the National Health Service and more recently, as a member of the Department of General Practice.
His early experience as a trainee nurse in a hospital addiction treatment setting led to an interest in constructive methods for helping people resolve difficult behaviour change problems.
This has taken him through a close collaboration with Professor William R Miller on the subject of motivational interviewing, a Doctoral thesis (1993) on counselling for excessive drinkers, to more recent work on consultations about lifestyle and medication use in healthcare practice.
[1] Rollnick used his experience in the field of addiction treatment to find ways in which healthcare professionals could combat ambivalence regarding change.