This week we’re seeing gorgeous spring Saint Louis weather on campus—cool, clear, plants greening out and blooming, and sparrows and cardinals singing in the morning. The last three days were alumni weekend, and I was grateful to have my son (AB ’25) and several of his friends visiting. We’re just about to turn the corner into finals and graduation and then things will get a lot quieter for the summer (though the labs will still be humming).
Speaking of alumni, on March 26 the School of Arts & Sciences hosted its annual distinguished alumni awards, and P&BS was prominently represented. Marcus Jecklin (AB ’12) received the Early Career Achievement Award. Marcus is a co-founder of Ai4, which is one of North America’s largest artificial intelligence industry conferences. James Risch (AB ’74, MSW ’76) received the Distinguished Alumni Award; James is co-founder of the consulting firm TorchFish, and a successful banker and financier. And Dr. Mark Gold (AB ’71) was awarded the Dean’s Medal. Mark is an eminent researcher in the field of addiction, former chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Florida, and pioneer of translating lab findings to the clinic. Mark is also a great friend to P&BS, having recently endowed the Dr. Mark Gold Lecture in Translational Neuroscience. In his recognition of our amazing alumni, Dean Hu remarked on how their success is congruent with the strength and momentum of the department.
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| Ryan Bodgan named William R. Stuckenberg Professor in Human Values and Moral Development
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Dr. Bogdan directs the Behavioral Research and Imaging Neurogenetics (BRAIN) lab, where his team studies mental health, substance involvement, and their biological (e.g., brain structure and function, inflammation) and environmental (e.g., prenatal exposures, adversity) correlates across the lifespan from the prenatal period to later life. Their work has characterized genetic correlates of mental health and examined putative biological and behavioral mechanistic pathways through which genetic variability and experiences shape psychiatric risk. As part of the national HEALthy Brain and Child Development (HBCD) Study, Ryan, his colleagues, and their research teams, are recruiting and longitudinally assessing thousands of pregnant women and their children to understand factors influencing early life brain and behavioral development. These data are being made available to approved researchers across the nation to accelerate the pace of scientific discovery.
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Barch wins major psychology prize from the National Academy of Sciences
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Deanna Barch, the Gregory B. Couch Professor of Psychiatry and a professor of psychological and brain sciences, has won the Atkinson Prize in Psychological and Cognitive Sciences from the National Academy of Sciences. One of the most prestigious honors in the field of psychology, the award recognizes researchers who have made “significant advances in the psychological and cognitive sciences,” according to the Academy.
The Academy cited Barch’s “seminal contributions to understanding behavior, brain, and mental health across development, especially in schizophrenia and childhood depression.” Her work, the Academy said, “has advanced our understanding of cognitive dysfunction and brain connectivity, influencing both basic psychological science and clinical interventions.”
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| | | Lexi Decker
Assistant Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences
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Dr. Chris Kurby grew up in Elmhurst, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. As a kid, he explored the gamut of junior sports leagues—soccer, baseball, wrestling, gaming—but it wasn’t until adulthood that he found his athletic passion. (More on that later.) He also got hooked on music; he learned to play the drums, marched in the band, and played in rock bands.
Chris imprinted on psychology as an undergraduate at Northern Illinois University. His first impulse was neuroscience; however, the faculty member he approached had a full lab. After talking with Chris about his interests, the neuroscience professor recommended he approach a cognitive psychologist, Joe Magliano. The two hit it off. Chris dove deep into the lab, studying text comprehension and memory, and stayed to complete his PhD with Magliano and Katja Wiemer. During this period, Chris initiated two lines of research, one on integration mechanisms in reading with a particular eye to education contexts, and the other on embodied mechanisms of comprehension.
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Elissa Kozlov grew up in Westchester County, New York, where she spent much of her high school and college years immersed in theater. She found herself repeatedly cast as older adult characters—which was confusing for a teenager but which that sparked a lasting appreciation for aging. Elissa found herself unusually invested in understanding these roles, working hard to capture the emotional texture and lived experience of aging long before she had the language to describe what drew her in. Around the same time, she volunteered in nursing homes and assisted living facilities throughout high school and college, where she became increasingly convinced that, as a society, we had not yet figured out how to support quality of life in later life. It felt like a problem worth thinking about indefinitely.
Although she had always been drawn to psychology, it was a freshman-year course on aging and biology at Wesleyan University that crystallized her interest in the intersection of psychological science and aging. A class video on aging in America included a segment on the “greying” of U.S. prisons, and Elissa found herself unable to shake questions about what it meant to grow old behind bars. That curiosity became the foundation of her senior thesis, in which she interviewed older adults who had aged while incarcerated to better understand the psychological and social dimensions of later life in prison. The project deepened her commitment to studying aging at the margins of health and social systems.
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| Merve Ileri-Tayar
Merve Ileri Tayar is in her fifth year in the Brain, Behavior, and Cognition area of our graduate program in PBS. She will be graduating with a PhD in May and beginning a post-doc at Duke University in Tobias Egner’s lab this summer. Merve is an international student who was born and raised in Çankırı, Türkiye. She knew she wanted to study psychology as early as middle school. She completed her undergraduate studies in psychology at TOBB University of Economics and Technology on a full scholarship. As a first-generation college student coming from a small city, this opportunity meant a lot to Merve and she made the most of it, ultimately working as a research assistant in a lab studying cognitive control and completing an honors thesis, before pursuing a master’s degree at Middle East Technical University. With the goal of pursuing a PhD in the United States, she applied for and received a Fulbright Scholarship but declined it in favor of the McDonnell International Scholars Academy fellowship at WashU.
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From Red Granite to Silicon Valley: Recent PhDs in the Technology Industry
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Alumni from our undergraduate and graduate programs go on to do a lot of different things. We provide two undergraduate majors: in Psychological & Brain Sciences and in Cognitive Neuroscience. A bachelor’s degree in Arts & Sciences is a broad liberal arts degree that qualifies a person for a wide range of careers, and our majors’ paths after graduation reflect this. Some undergraduate alumni go on to further study in psychology or a related field, but many go on to careers in business, medicine, creative practice, and other diverse pursuits.
A PhD in Psychological & Brain Sciences is a specialized degree that qualifies a person to lead independent research in psychological science and neuroscience. (Our Clinical Science PhD program, together with state licensure, additionally qualifies a person to provide evidence-based psychotherapy.) This means that alumni of our PhD program tend to pursue a narrower range of careers—but not as narrow as you might think! Despite the stereotype that all PhDs pursue academic careers, our graduates have always followed a range of pathways: professor, consultant, clinical practitioner, researcher in government or industry, human factors specialist, demographer...
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| Cheri Casanova
After more than four decades of dedicated service to the department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, we celebrate the impressive career of Cheri Casanova as she prepares to retire from Washington University in St. Louis.
Joining WashU in October 1982, Cheri began her journey with passion for working at a major university and a particular interest in the field of psychology. With little initial guidance in the role, she embraced the opportunity to shape the position into something uniquely her own. Cheri truly molded the position into what it is today. Now, after years of commitment and change, she looks forward to passing the book.
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