Welcome to the official Department of Psychology newsletter! 

Congratulations to Allie Adamis on being featured in National Social Anxitey Center (NSAC).  She was featured in the graduate student spotlight.  Read more here. 

Shaina will be joining the Department of Psychology in Fall 2026 as a Senior Lecturer.  She earned her PhD in Social and Personality Psychology at UT Austin and her Bachelor's degree in Neuroscience and Psychology at Johns Hopkins University. Her research includes how our emotions—and the ways we communicate about them—shape our social relationships and well-being.

Learn more about Shaina here. 

Announcing a very Special Issue of The Journal of Comparative Neurology: Jon Kaas' Festschrift.  Jon Kaas’s name is readily recognized in many neuroscience circles reaching well beyond Jon’s area of specialty: the organization and evolution of the primate cerebral cortex and somatomotor pathways. Jon, who remains active and absolutely not ready to retire (don’t ask!) at Vanderbilt University, his academic home since 1973, has trained, influenced, advised, supervised, collaborated with, or simply taken under his wing an enormous number of scientists who today count among the top experts in various fields of neuroscience. Read more here. 

To contribute to the issue, click here. 

Suzana spoke before and after the original showing of Planet of the Apes on April 2 at the Belcourt.  More information here. 

Join Dr. Maxcey for the Psychology Book Club and the email list by completing this form.

Dr. Maxcey will share more information this summer.

Below are the list of books. 

The following article by, Joe Lappin and Herb Bell was published in the Journal of Vision:  “Temporal processes of information transmission from visual search to behavior”, Journal of Vision (2026) 26(3):8, 1–15; https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.26.3.8.  The article was a contribution to a special issue of the journal on “Psychophysical magic” in honor of Randolph Blake, a collection of articles stimulated by his impactful research on the nature and temporal processes of conscious visual perception. This is also a contribution to the festschrift honoring Randolph.  The paper describes a new methodology or paradigm for quantifying temporal processes.  Co-author Herbert H. Bell is an alumnus of our Department who had a long career at the Air Force Research Laboratory.  

Alena is an Assistant Professor at the University of Zagreb in Croatia.  She is a Park Lab alumni who recently received a 2026 Early Career Award from the Schizophrenia International Research Society. This award is granted to early career investigators who have demonstrated strong scientific and professional interest in the field through their research, teaching, or clinical activities.

Junghee is an Associate Professor in Neurobiology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.  She was a Park Lab Alumni who recently was elected to join the Board of Directors of the Schizophrenia International Research Society.

Chloe Hord, Vanderbilt University Class of 2024, has accepted an offer to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to pursue her PhD in Clinical Psychology.  In 2024 Chloe graduated from Vanderbilt magna cum laude with her B.A. in Psychology and French, with Highest Honors in French.

During her undergraduate years, Chloe served as Dr. Maxcey’s learning assistant (LA) for PSY 2100 Quantitative Methods in the Fall of 2022 (100 students) and PSY 1200 General Psychology class in the Fall of 2023 (198 students) and Spring of 2024 (202 students). Chloe was instrumental in elevating the classroom experience for 500 Vanderbilt undergraduate students.  Read more here. 

William Quackenbush, a graduate student in the Wallace lab was granted his F31 trainee grant by the NIH. Will is a Neuroscience Graduate Student through the VBI.  Congrats Will!

OPL and CATlab grad students Melina Mueller, Yinuo Peng, Ikhwan Jeon, and Jin Jeong participated in BrainBlast, introducing kids and curious adults to challenging tasks with faces and other objects that we use to study perception.

"Vanderbilt" and the Vanderbilt logo are registered trademarks and service marks of Vanderbilt University.