The State of the Department

Greetings from the Department of Psychology at the beginning of the 2015-2016 academic year. I am honored and excited to be back in the Chair’s Office after a two-year respite. Amanda Woodward has accepted a position as Deputy Dean for Faculty Affairs in the Social Sciences and as chair, it has been a pleasure to work with her in this new position. We are off to a running start this year, welcoming fifteen new graduate students to the Department and three new faculty members. The faculty members are Ed Awh, Ed Vogel, whose research is featured in this newsletter, and Alex Shaw, whose research was featured in the previous newsletter. The expertise of these new faculty members contribute greatly to the intellectual vitality of the Department, enhancing our research and teaching.

At the same time we welcomed these new faculty members, we said a sad goodbye to a valued colleague, Katherine Kinzler, who is now a professor in the Departments of Psychology and Human Development at Cornell University. Several of Katie’s students remain at Chicago and she has active collaborations with many faculty in the Department. We wish Katie and her family all the best in their new adventure.

This year, we are searching for a new faculty member with a specialty in developmental psychology. Having received more than 150 applications, we are about to start interviewing a handful of candidates. Our ability to attract outstanding new faculty members and graduate students to the Department is fundamental to our mission to build the Department and remain one of the premier psychology programs in the country.

I continue to be awed by the success of our faculty and graduate students, as they publish important research in leading journals in the field. In this newsletter, you will see examples of this work. Notably, many of these efforts involve team science, which is a hallmark of our departmental culture. In recent discussions of what makes our Department unique, the faculty identified three signatures of our departmental culture – interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and a research focus on big questions. These characteristics permeate our approach to research as well as out teaching and mentoring of students.

This past year, many of our faculty were recognized for their contributions to the field. To cite a few examples, Sian Beilock was elected Fellow in Division 3 of the American Psychological Association; John Cacioppo received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, was elected Inaugural Fellow by Society for Social Neuroscience, and was listed as one of the top 50 “most eminent psychologists of the modern era” in a report published by the American Psychological Association; Daniel Casasanto was awarded the Psychonomic Society’s Early Career Award for Exceptional Research Contributions to Scientific Psychology; Susan Goldin-Meadow was the 2015 recipient of the Association for Psychological Science’s William James Award for a Lifetime Achievement in Basic Research and she was elected a Fellow in the highly selective Society of Experimental Psychologists; and Amanda Woodward was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

As always, we welcome all of our alumni and friends to stop by and visit our Department, and to attend Departmental colloquia, which are posted on our website.