Welcome to the official Department of Psychology newsletter!
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Congratulations to Frank Tong on being elected a fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists (SEP).
The Society of Experimentalists was founded by Edward Bradford Titchener in 1904. Titchener’s design for his “Experimentalists” was that it be an ongoing workshop, with “members visiting labs, studying apparatus, and hearing and commenting on reports of ongoing research.
Read more here.
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Congratulations to Sohee Park for winning the Gutenberg Chair award! Aiming to foster international scientific collaboration with the premier research institutes of France’s Alsace and Grand Est Region, the award provides 60,000 euros as a grant to facilitate a one-year research collaboration between Park and Anne Giersch, the deputy director of the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research and head of the Translational Neuroscience and Psychiatry Unit at the University of Strasbourg. Park will work to develop a novel approach to examine the nature of the body and the self in those with schizophrenia, hoping to advance our understanding of the intricate relationship between the physical and the psychological. Read more here.
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CLINICAL INTERNSHIP PLACEMENTS |
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Tatiana Baxter
Mentor: Sohee Park
Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC-IPP)
Nashville, TN
Adult Psychiatry - Psychosis
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| Katrina Rbeiz
Mentor: Sohee Park
University of Washington-Psychiatry
Seattle, WA
General Adult Psychology
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| Laura Stevens
Mentor: Krista Mehari
Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children's Hospital
Chicago, IL
Pediatric or Clinical Child Track
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Grad Student Recruitment Weekend: February 5th-7th, 2026
This year faculty interviewed 19 phenomenal candidates to join our Ph.D. Program in Fall 2026. Thank you to everyone who helped make their visit to campus successful!
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Originally from Lima, Peru, Faith joins our administrative team as a Program Specialist. After graduating from Wheaton College in 2024, she moved to Nashville to participate in a vocational discernment fellowship program and experience life in Tennessee. Her love for academia and detailed work led her to this new position at Vanderbilt University. In her free time, she enjoys going on walks with friends, writing, traveling to visit family, and sipping black coffee on a porch swing.
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Ashleigh Maxcey’s TEDxNashville talk — What happens when you grade joy — was just selected as an Editor’s Pick by TED. From a Nashville stage to a global audience.
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Kemberlee Bonnet published her most recent article in Diabetic Medicine titled "Qualitative care experiences of emerging adults with type 1 diabetes after transfer to adult care providers."
Emerging adulthood is a developmental stage, which presents psychosocial, economic and academic challenges to individuals, which are further complicated for people with type 1 diabetes (T1D). While paediatric-based care systems have developed programmes to address the needs of young adults with T1D, adult-based systems have been slower to recognize this need. This qualitative study sought to understand the care experiences of emerging adults to identify barriers to engagement in adult-based care systems. Read more here.
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Catherine McQueen, BA '23 |
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Catherine, Maxcey Lab alumni, just finished her first semester at UC Berkeley's Information Management and Systems master's program, and has been loving her time there! She has learned so much already and recently accepted an internship at Adobe this summer as a User Experience Research intern, where she will help research some of their new digital experience products. She wouldn't have been able to start her grad program or accept this internship without Dr. Maxcey's help!
Learn more about Catherine's story here.
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Former Kaas Lab graduate student, Eva Sawyer, is an author on an upcoming cover story. This issue of Science will be available to read on March 12, 2026. In this article, Eva discusses vocal learning in seals and uses some histology, learned in the Kaas Lab and some DTI on brains she collected.
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The Emotion & Anxiety Research Lab (EARL) | |
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Why do some people develop anxiety disorders while others do not? What role does disgust—an emotion typically associated with contamination and disease—play in conditions like OCD and PTSD? And how can we improve cognitive-behavioral treatments to help more people recover?
EARL investigates the measurement, development, maintenance, and treatment of anxiety and related disorders. The lab takes an experimental psychopathology approach, using basic research methods to understand how emotions—particularly fear, disgust, and anger—contribute to anxiety pathology. A key focus is disgust: EARL has shown that heightened disgust proneness and disgust learning characterize OCD, and that disgust-related processes predict contamination fears, avoidance behaviors, and treatment response. The lab also examines how repetitive negative thinking, emotion regulation difficulties, and attentional biases maintain anxiety across disorders. Read more here.
Lab website
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Congratulations to Jo-Anne Bachorowski who retired at the end of December 2025 and congratulations to David Schlundt who will retire in May 2026!
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Vanderbilt students are collaborating with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP) to host an Out of the Darkness Walk on Vanderbilt's campus on March 21st, 2026. The Out of the Darkness Campus Walks are AFSP's signature student fundraising and community building series, designed to engage youth and young adults in the fight to prevent suicide, the third leading cause of death among people ages 15-24. More information about the event here.
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