News / Blog

Administrative Updates & Announcements

The Department of Psychology is pleased to announce that Professor Jeff Simpson (Social Psychology area) will take over as the Department Chair beginning June 11th, 2018. We are also pleased to announce the appointment of our next Associate Chairs and Director of Graduate Studies. The next Associate Chair for Research will be Professor Rich Lee, and the next Associate Chair for Curriculum/Instruction will be Associate Professor Moin Syed. Our new Director of Graduate Studies will be Professor Pat Frazier.

Iris Vilares from University College London and the Virginia Tech Carillion Research Institute has accepted our faculty offer and will be joining us in the Fall of 2018 as an Assistant Professor. She will join the faculty in the Cognitive and Brain Sciences area.

Marina McCuskey, Assistant to the Chair's Office since October 2016, has resigned from her position effective 3/27/2017. Marina accepted an Executive Accounts Specialist position in Plant Sciences/Bioproducts and Biosystems Engineering Finance Team in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences (CFANS) Office of Finance and Budget.

Awards & Accomplishments

Professor Jeff Simpson has received the 2018 Distinguished Mentoring Award, which is given every two years by the International Association for Relationship Research. 

Emeritus Professor James N. Butcher has published two new volumes:

Butcher, J. N. (Editor-in-Chief), & Hooley, J. M. (Ed.) (2018). APA Handbook of Psychopathology: Vol 1. Understanding, assessing, and treating adult mental disorders. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Butcher, J. N. (Editor-in-Chief), & Kendall, P.C. (Ed.) (2018). APA handbook of psychopathology: Vol 2. Psychopathology of children and adolescents. Washington, D. C. American Psychological Association.

Graduated

Administrative Updates & Announcements

The Department of Psychology is pleased to announce that the search to fill the newly created grant-accounting assistant position was a success and that Kristen Abernethy accepted our offer. She will begin transitioning to her new duties on Monday, February 19th.  

As Kristen is currently working in the accounting area, we will begin the search for someone to replace her. You will not notice any changes right away. Kristen will remain in her current office and you should continue to contact Terry Klosterman, Kamran Motevaze and Kristen with any accounting questions you have for now. Also, continue to contact Liz Gates for grant related issues. An announcement will be sent out at a later date to describe changes that will affect you as accounting and grant duties are re-assigned.

Awards & Accomplishments

Professor Jonathan Gewirtz, Associate Chair for Curriculum and Director of Undergraduate Studies, has been awarded the Horace T. Morse Alumni Association Award for Outstanding Contributions to Undergraduate Education. The award honors individuals who are judged to be among the University's most outstanding undergraduate teachers. Details on the award may be found here. 

Professor Alex Rothman, director of the Social Psychology area, has been awarded a 2017-18 Award for Outstanding Contributions to Graduate and Professional Education. This honor is awarded to exceptional candidates nominated by colleges in their quest to identify excellence in graduate and professional education. More information and a list of awardees may be found here.

The Minnesota Center for Twin and Family Research’s Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study, with University of Minnesota PIs Bill Iacono and Monica Luciana, was featured in the Today Show. The MCTFR is one of 21 sites across the US implementing the study. Watch here.

Social area graduate student Richie Lenne received the Preregistration Challenge Award from the Center for Open Science for research published in the Journal of Health Psychology.

Personality, Individual Differences, and Behavior Genetics (PIB) and Quantitative/Psychometric Methods (QPM) graduate student Gretchen Saunders received the Eva O. Miller Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. The title of her fellowship proposal is “The Relationship Between Early Substance Exposure and Adult Health Outcomes Using Causally Informative Designs.” She is jointly advised by Matt McGue (PIB) and Niels Waller (QPM).

The Department of Psychology is delighted to announce the recipients of the first annual Psychology Department Distinguished Alumni Awards. Nominations were invited from graduate and undergraduate alumni with the expectation that we would make one award from each area. We received over 20 nominations yielding an exceptional pool of candidates. The nominations were reviewed by a selection committee, who provided recommendations to the department.

The Distinguished Alumni award winners are:

Mary P. Koss, Ph.D.

Dr. Koss received her Ph.D. from the clinical psychology program in 1972. She is currently Regents’ Professor in the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, Division of Health Promotion Sciences at the University of Arizona.

Heather J. Peters, Ph.D. LP, CC-AASP

Dr. Peters received her B.A. from our department in 2000. She is currently Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Morris.

Drs. Koss and Peters have been invited to attend our Centennial gala on May 11th to receive their awards. You will learn more about their achievements at that time. Dr. Koss cannot make it due to another travel commitment but she plans to capture her acceptance on video to be shared during the event. Dr. Peters is able to attend.

Graduated

Awards & Announcements

Psychology Chair and Distinguished McKnight Professor Monica Luciana on the roots of mental illness and impacts of drug abuse here.

Professor Paul Sackett will be awarded the Distinguished Teaching Contribution Award by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology at the Society's annual conference in Chicago in April.  The Society gives lifetime achievement awards for Research, Teaching, and Service.  Professor Sackett is the only person to receive all three of these awards.

Professor Paul Sackett comments in Scientific American about why people dislike really smart leaders.

Dr. Ying-Zi Xiong is the recipient of the Outstanding Postdoctoral Scholar of 2017 at UMN, awarded by the Postdoctoral Association. Ying-Zi’s research deals with visual aspects of reading in normal and low vision. She is working with Gordon Legge in the Minnesota Lab for Low-Vision Research, and also with Peggy Nelson and colleagues in the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science (CATSS).
The award will be presented to Ying-Zi during a town Hall in March. Congratulations to Ying-Zi for this honor!

CSPR graduate student Jeremy Harper received the Eva O. Miller Fellowship for the 2018-2019 academic year. The title of his fellowship proposal is "Substance Use Problems, Impaired Cognitive Control, and Prefrontal Cortex Anomalies: Using Twins to Disentangle Determinants and Consequences of Substance Misuse." He is advised by William G. Iacono.

Emeritus professor Tom Bouchard has just been awarded the Dunnette Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in the field of psychology. The prize is awarded every three years to “to honor living individuals whose work has significantly expanded knowledge of the causal significance of individual differences through advanced research, development, and/or application.”

Four Psychology Majors received the Mulhollem Craven's Leadership Scholarship for next summer:
Yuchen Liu, Katherine Rosenow, Alex Clauson, and Wengi Luo
This is a $5000 award that can be applied to a paid or unpaid summer internship in 2018. Students have until May 1st to secure an internship site.

Graduated

Chaitali Phadke
Area: QPM
Advisor: Dave Weiss
Dissertation: Measuring Intra-Individual Change at Two or More Occasions With Hypothesis Testing Methods

Melissa Sharpe
Area: I/O
Advisor: Paul Sackett
Dissertation: Self-Other Agreement on Performance Ratings as a Predictor of Individual Longitudinal Outcomes and Future Agreement

Grants

Professor Alex Rothman along with colleagues in the School of Public Health, School of Medicine, and Fairview Health Services have been awarded a grant from NIH to develop and test intervention strategies that can be embedded within the electronic medical record to support physician’s prescribing decisions for patients with chronic pain.

Visiting Scholars

Jolien van Aar, a graduate student from the University of Amsterdam is visiting during the spring 2018 semester to work with Alex Rothman and his research lab. Her visit is supported by a University of Amsterdam UvA385 Fellowship.

Upcoming Events

Psychology Undergraduate Celebration
Friday, May 4th, 2018
4:00pm - 6:00pm at the Campus Club,
Coffman Memorial Union

Please mark your calendars and plan to attend the annual recognition celebration for psychology undergraduate students. This annual event recognizes our outstanding undergraduate achievements and graduating seniors. Formal RSVPs will come out mid-semester.

Those Undergraduate Students recognized will include:

Spring 2018 Degree Applicants
Mortensen Scholarship & Award recipients
Select CLA, University and National Scholarship recipients
Outstanding achievement in the Major Project: The Sharon Borine Awards
2017-18 UROP recipients
Donor Awards for Psychology Undergraduate Engagement recipients
2017-18 Psi Chi Inductees

Please forward any questions to Mike Houlahan, mhoulaha@umn.edu.

Awards & Accomplishments

Professor Mark Snyder, McKnight Presidential Chair in Psychology, and his research on the causes and consequences of volunteerism and other forms of prosocial action are featured in an article in the January 2018 issue of MplsStPaul magazine, entitled "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"

Associate Professor Shmuel Lissek is quoted at CNN International about how to cope with fears of a nuclear disaster.

Assistant Professor Nicola Grissom’s research on Autism was featured in the Office of the Vice President for Research’s Inquiry, which can be found here.

Assistant Professor Scott Vrieze has been selected as a Rising Star in the Association for Psychological Science. APS Rising Stars reflect the best and brightest of early stage investigators in psychological science. The complete list of 2017 Rising Stars will appear in the January issue of the APS Observer, and information on the award can be found here.

Before graduating, each of our undergraduate seniors must complete an individual major project that is the capstone of their undergraduate training in psychology. The Sharon Borine Award was established by one of our alumnae for the purpose of recognizing the best of these projects. Each semester, our lab section leaders nominate the top project from their class and then 3 Finalists are selected from this pool of nominees. A faculty panel reviews the Finalist projects for the awards. Third Place includes an award of $75, 2nd Place includes an award of $150, and 1st Place includes an award of $250.

1^st place: Nova J. Bradford/Implications of Transnormativity in Transgender Identity Development: Social Support, Gender Determinism, and Intracommunity Border Wars

2^nd place: Stacy A. Alme/Prevalence of Gendered Words in Tech Job Advertisements and Their Impact on Women Enrolled in STEM

3^rd place: Catherine Richards/Grammatical Gender’s Effect on Inferences of Biological Sex in Spanish Speakers

Administrative Updates & Announcements

The University of Minnesota WiFi network “UofM Secure” is scheduled to be retired at the end of December 2017.  Users should connect NOW to eduroam, the new preferred secure WiFi network for University of Minnesota students, faculty, and staff. UofM-Guest is available for guest and visitor WiFi access only.

To connect to eduroam, choose “eduroam” from your WiFi network preferences or options and enter your FULL University email address and password. Additionally, please “forget” the UofM Secure network and change your preferred or default network to eduroam. If you would like more detailed instructions, please view the how-to connect to eduroam page, visit the University’s WiFi troubleshooting guide, or contact Technology Help.

Awards & Accomplishments

Sha Li, Graduate Student in the Cognitive and Brain Sciences area, received a 2017 Dissertation Research Award from the American Psychological Association. The purpose of the award is to assist science-oriented doctoral students of psychology with research costs. The title of Sha's dissertation project is "Characterizing Perceptual Learning of Chest X-ray Image." Sha is advised by Dr. Yuhong Jiang.

Mindy Westlund Schreiner, Graduate Student in the CSPR area, named a recipient of one of the Society of Biological Psychiatry’s 2018 Predoctoral Travel Fellowship Awards. The award consists of $2,000 to help defray costs to attend the Society’s 2018 meeting, along with waived registration to the 2018, 2019 and 2020 meetings.

ICSU and ISSC join together for future science efforts.
During the past year, emeritus faculty Bruce Overmier has been serving as the US National Academy of Sciences’ Voting Delegate to the Extraordinary Joint General Assembly of the International Council of Science and International Social Science Council in Oslo and again recently in Taipei, as well as the on Joint Transition Task Force (Paris), forging a new union between these two international organizations. The efforts were successful and the two each voted in Taipei to become one so as to bring the broadest span of sciences to address the Global Challenges before humanity. The union will become final with an electronic vote in March 2018 and the first General Assembly of new organization will likely be in October 2018 in Paris.

Graduated

Congratulations to our recent Department of Psychology Ph. D graduates!

Visiting Scholars

Professor Ping Chen from Beijing Normal University is joining Chun Wang's lab as a visiting scholar for one year from November, 2017.