Awards 2015

Faculty | Students

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FACULTY

Kirsten Bradbury Received UT's 2015-16 President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award

Psychology lecturer Kirsten Bradbury has received UT's President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award for the 2015–16 academic year. The prestigious award is one of nine university-wide teaching awards administered by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost. (12/11/2015)

Dr. James Pennebaker Awarded 2016 APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award

Professor James W. Pennebaker was selected as the 2016 recipient of the American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology. The Award is among the highest honors for scientific achievement by psychologists, honoring those who have made distinguished theoretical or empirical advances in psychology leading to the understanding or amelioration of important practical problems. (11/16/2015) Read more>

Dr. Cristine Legare Receives 2015 LIFE Outstanding Alumni Award

Professor Cristine Legare was awarded the 2015 LIFE Outstanding Alumni Award from the International Doctoral Training Program of the International Max Planck Research School on the Life Course (LIFE), whose goal it is to study the systematic changes in human behavior over evolutionary and ontogenetic time. The program has a coalition of partners: Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Freie Universität Berlin, Humboldt-Universität of Berlin, University of Michigan, University of Virginia, and University of Zurich. (10/20/2015)

Prof. Cindy Meston Awarded 2015 Wulf H. Utian Endowed Lecture and Award by the North American Menopause Society

Dr. Cindy Meston was awarded the 2015 Wulf H. Utian Endowed Lecture and Award by the North American Menopause Society (NAMS) in recognition of her outstanding research and lectures on women's sexual health. She received the award at the NAMS Annual Meeting. (10/5/2015)

Prof. Emeritus John Loehlin Awarded the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR) 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award

Psychology Professor Emeritus Dr. John Loehlin was awarded the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR). The award is ISIR’s highest honor, reserved for individuals who have, over their professional lifetime, substantially advanced the field of intelligence. (9/25/2015) Read more>

Prof. David Yeager Awarded Society for Personality and Social Psychology's Robert B. Cialdini Award

Dr. David Yeager was awarded SPSP's Robert B. Cialdini Award for his paper, “Breaking the Cycle of Mistrust: Wise Interventions to Provide Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide,” which was published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2014, vol. 143. The award recognizes the publication that best explicates social psychological phenomena principally through the use of field research methods and settings and that thereby demonstrates the relevance of the discipline to communities outside of academic social psychology. (8/27/2015) Read more>

Prof. William B. Swann Winner of the International Society for Self and Identity's 2015 Distinguished Lifetime Career Award

Dr. William Swann was honored with the 2015 Distinguished Lifetime Career Award by the International Society for Self and Identity (ISSI) for his "many outstanding theoretical, empirical, and applied contributions over more than three decades, which have included truly seminal advances in understanding the nature and consequences of self-verification, identity negotiation, and identity fusion." (8/17/2015)

Dr. Bharath Chandrasekaran Selected for Best Paper in Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research

Dr. Bharath Chandrasekaran's article, "Enhancing Speech Intelligibility: Interactions Among Context, Modality, Speech Style, and Masker," was selected as the winner of the 2014 Editor’s Award by the editor and associate editors of the Hearing section of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. The Editor’s Award is a high honor, with selection limited to the most impactful works that meet the highest quality standards in research design and presentation. (8/11/2015)

Dr. Bharath Chandrasekaran Receives UT System 2015 Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award

Dr. Bharath Chandrasekaran was one of 11 faculty members from UT Austin chosen to receive 2015 Regents' Outstanding Teaching Awards by the Board of Regents of The University of Texas System. The awards program honors outstanding performance in the classroom and dedication to innovation in undergraduate instruction. (7/13/2015) Read more>

Prof. Cristine Legare Awarded Prestigious 2016 Boyd McCandless Early Career Award

Dr. Cristine Legare received the American Psychological Association's 2016 Boyd McCandless Award, given to only one early career scientist per year. The award recognizes a distinguished theoretical contribution to developmental psychology, programmatic research of distinction or a distinguished contribution to the dissemination of developmental science. (7/3/2015) Read more>

Drs. Paige Harden and Elliot Tucker-Drob Receive Fuller and Scott Early Career Award

Professors Paige Harden and Elliot Tucker-Drob were awarded the Fuller and Scott Early Career Award from the Behavior Genetics Association. The award is given for outstanding scientific accomplishments to members of the Behavior Genetics Association who are early in their careers. (6/24/2015)

Prof. Yeager Article on Anti-Bullying Programs Selected for 2015 Division 7 Early Career Outstanding Paper Award

Professor David Yeager's article, "Declines in efficacy of anti-bullying programs among older adolescents," was selected for the American Psychological Association's Division 7 Early Career Outstanding Paper Award for 2015. The article was published in the March–April 2015 edition of the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. (6/1/2015)

Dr. David Schnyer Awarded Raymond Dickson Centennial Endowed Teaching Fellowship

Prof. David Schnyer was awarded the Raymond Dickson Centennial Endowed Teaching Fellowship for the 2014–15 academic year by the UT College of Liberal Arts. The award recognizes faculty who exemplify outstanding teaching and a commitment to excellence. They demonstrate high academic standards, not only to instruct, but to inspire. (5/8/2015)

Dr. Greg Hixon Awarded Arnold H. Buss Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching

Dr. John G (Greg) Hixon has been awarded the Psychology Department's Arnold H. Buss Teaching Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. The award, created in honor of Dr. Arnold Buss, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, was created in 2008 to be given annually to an outstanding lecturer who has demonstrated a high level of excellence in undergraduate teaching. (5/1/2015)

Dr. Jessica Church-Lang Receives UT's Josefina Paredes Endowed Teaching Award for 2014-15

Professor Jessica Church-Lang was awarded the UT College of Liberal Arts' prestigious Josefina Paredes Endowed Teaching Award for the 2014-15 academic year. The award recognizes junior faculty in the College of Liberal Arts who exemplify outstanding teaching. Dr. Church-Lang was noted for her commitment to excellence and outstanding performance in teaching, as well as her high academic standards, which "not only instruct, but also inspire." (5/1/2015)

Dr. Yeager Wins Early Career Award for Contributions to Social and Emotional Learning Research

Professor David Yeager has been awarded The Joseph E. Zins Early Career Award for Contributions to Social and Emotional Learning Research. The award is presented to one researcher each year who has made substantial contributions to the field of social and emotional learning and kindred fields in schools or school districts. (4/6/2015)

Psychology Alumnus Dr. Robert Plomin Receives Outstanding Alumnus Award

Robert Joseph Plomin, an alumnus of the Department of Psychology, has been named a 2015 Outstanding Alumnus by the Graduate School at UT Austin. The annual award recognizes an alumnus/a of the Graduate School for academic or professional achievements since graduating from the university.

Dr. Plomin received his doctorate from UT Austin in 1974 and is considered one the Department of Psychology's most distinguished alumni, one who has truly achieved preeminence in his academic and professional career. His work has had great impact on medicine and psychology. (3/13/2015)

Dr. Juan Dominguez Appointed Provost's Teaching Fellow

Professor Juan Dominguez was one of 20 faculty members from across UT to be appointed as Provost's Teaching Fellows, becoming the second group of Fellows in the program to help ensure UT Austin remains a leader in higher education.

The Provost's Teaching Fellows program, established in 2013, strengthens faculty participation and governance in the Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL), enhances faculty collaboration across disciplinary and institutional boundaries, and supports faculty-led projects to improve teaching and learning. (3/2/2015)

Dr. Francisco Gonzalez-Lima Selected as 2015 Texas Distinguished Scientist by Texas Academy of Sciences

Professor Francisco Gonzalez-Lima has been awarded the 2015 Texas Distinguished Scientist award of the Texas Academy of Sciences for his "outstanding contributions to the neurosciences and education in the state of Texas."

Dr. Gonzalez-Lima is the George I. Sanchez Centennial Professor at UT, and is an internationally recognized neuroscience leader who investigates the relationship between brain energy metabolism, memory and neurobehavioral disorders.

The award will be given to Dr. Gonzalez-Lima in a dinner ceremony at the 118th Annual Meeting of the Texas Academy of Science in San Antonio, March 7, 2015. (1/15/2015)

Dr. Cristine Legare Awarded APS Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions

Dr. Cristine Legare has been recognized as a 2015 winner of the Association for Psychological Science's Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. The award, named for APS’s first elected president, who passed away in March, recognizes six psychological scientists who cross traditional sub-disciplinary lines in psychological science and honors contributions that reveal the organization underlying complex behavior by drawing upon multiple fields of psychological science.

The award places Dr. Legare "among (the) brightest minds in our field, setting an impressively high standard for the award in years to come." (1/9/2015)

More on the 2015 Spence awards, including an interview with Dr. Legare, can be read here.

Professor Gawronski Named Recipient of SPSP's Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize

Dr. Bertram Gawronski has been named the recipient of the The Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize, given annually by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

The Daniel M. Wegner Theoretical Innovation Prize recognizes an article or book chapter judged to provide the most innovative theoretical contribution to social/personality psychology within a given year. It recognizes theoretical articles that are especially likely to generate the discovery of new hypotheses, new phenomena, or new ways of thinking about the discipline of social/personality psychology. The emphasis of the prize is on a contribution's conceptual innovation and potential to motivate new research and further conceptual investigation, rather than on its current level of empirical support. (1/9/2015)

STUDENTS

Undergraduate Students Aurora Brinkman and Monika Pyarali Awarded David Ivey Scholarships

The recipients of the $600 David Ivey Scholarship for the 2015–2016 academic year are Aurora Brinkman and Monika Pyarali. The David Ivey Scholarship is a memorial endowed scholarship designed to reward Psychology undergraduate students who spend time doing community service while enrolled at UT. Every fall, two Psychology undergraduate students are selected from an applicant pool to receive an award (the amount of the award varies depending on income generated by the endowment). (11/23/2015)

IMHR Graduate Student Santiago Papini Wins 2015 International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies Student Poster Award

IMHR grad student Santiago Papini received the 2015 International Society of Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) Student Poster Award at ISTSS' Annual Meeting. His poster title was "Trajectories Of Early Response to Treatment Predict Post-Treatment Outcomes among Women with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder". The award is presented annually to recognize excellent work in a poster submission to the ISTSS Annual Meeting. The winner is selected by a panel of judges among a pool of finalists. (11/9/2015)

Graduate Student Stephanie Sherman Awarded APA's Dissertation Research Award

Stephanie Sherman, a graduate student in the Learning and Memory Laboratory, has been selected for the prestigious 2015 American Psychological Association Dissertation Research Award. The Award Program seeks to encourage excellence in dissertation research in psychological science by assisting science-oriented doctoral students of psychology with research costs. Ms. Sherman's dissertation will focus on Sleep and Memory in Aging. (11/4/2015)

Eight Psychology Students Awarded Undergraduate Research Fellowships for Fall 2015

Undergraduate Research Fellowships (URF) are sponsored by UT's Office of the Vice President for Research and have long been a valuable tool for undergraduate students in all disciplines across campus for developing original research ideas and projects. The Fellowships provide support for scholarly investigative projects conducted by UT Austin undergraduates, and are intended to cover costs associated with academic research projects proposed and written by student applicants and undertaken with the supervision of a University faculty member or lecturer. (10/23/2015)

The awardees, their supervisors and their topics are:

Jiazhou Chen (David Schnyer, Supervisor), “The effects of atypical sleep-wake cycle on core executive functioning in student night shift workers with sleep quality and fragmentation as mediator”;
Abigail Hanna (Todd Maddox, Supervisor), “The Effect of Childhood Trauma on Explicit and Implicit Category Learning”;
Alyssa Hernandez (Jessica Church-Lang, Supervisor), “Task Control Development and Variability in Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder”;
Vanessa Hernandez (Todd Maddox, Supervisor), “The Effects of Hybrid Learning Schedules on Hierarchical Categorization”;
Sarrah Ratcliff (Cristine Legare, Supervisor), “Ritual's effect on tool use”;
Jacie Richardson (Jennifer Beer, Supervisor), “The Role of Medial Prefrontal Cortex in Social Evaluation: A Marker of Socioemotional Relation or Informational Advantage?”;
Francis Shue (Michael Drew (NEU), Supervisor), “Effect of Embryonic Fetal Cells on Maternal Progenitor Brain Cells”; and
Michael Viacheslavov (Stephen Phelps (BIO), Supervisor), “The retrosplenial cortex and the ability for male prairie voles (Microtus ochragaster) to form pair bonds with mates”.

Three Psychology Students Awarded Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) Pre-Graduate Internship Program Kuhn Awards for Fall 2015

Psychology students Anisha Mehra, Shama Momin and Karen Rojas were awarded Fall 2015 Intellectual Entrepreneurship Kuhn Awards, which are intended to support and encourage first-generation and/or economically-disadvantaged college students to pursue opportunities that further enrich the pre-graduate school internship experience (e.g., traveling to conferences, potential graduate school visits, research endeavors, supplies, books etc.). (10/12/2015) Read more>

Psychology Doctoral Student Carey Pulverman Awarded Frances Fowler Wallace Dissertation Award

Carey S. Pulverman, a doctoral student in the Psychology Department, was selected to receive the 2015 Frances Fowler Wallace Memorial for Mental Health Dissertation Award by the Hogg Foundation. The award will go to support research expenses for her dissertation on the relationship between childhood sexual abuse, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder in women. (4/29/2015) More information>

Graduate Student Stevie Schein Wins 2015 APS Annual Student Research Award

Graduate student Stevie Schein was awarded the Association for Psychological Science's Student Research Award for 2015. Her submission, "Longer exposure duration to unattractive infants elicits negative responses from adults," was one of four winners from applicants nationwide.

Ms. Schein is a graduate student in the Langlois Social Development Lab, which as part of the Children’s Research Lab, focuses on children's social development, with particular emphasis on the origins of social stereotypes. (4/8/2015)

More information on the APS Student Research Award can be found here.

2015 Dean's Distinguished Graduates List Includes Psychology Students Courtney Crosby & Michelle Jackson

Two Psychology students—Courtney Crosby and Michelle Jackson—were included in the Dean's Distinguished Graduates Honorable Mention list for 2015.

Courtney Crosby is a student working in Dr. Cristine Legare's lab, as well as in Dr. Cindy Meston’s lab. Michelle Jackson is a Psychology Special Honors student. (3/11/2015)

See the complete list of awardees here.

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