The State of the Department

With the end of fall quarter and the holidays approaching, it is a great time to reconnect with our alumni and friends. This year, we welcomed thirteen new graduate students in our Department. These students hale from as close by as the University itself to as far away as India. Our new students arrived with many ideas for research and are busy completing fall courses, including our Proseminar. In the Proseminar, students not only become acquainted with the research programs of our faculty, they also prepare NSF applications. Last year we had three students win highly competitive NSF Graduate Research Fellowships, and one receive an honorable mention. That is a terrific result, and we eagerly await the results for the students who have applied this year.

This fall, our faculty welcomed a new lecturer to the Department – Katherine Krpan. Her expertise in clinical neuroscience will broaden the offerings in the Department and will address an area that is of high interest to our undergraduates. This first year, Katie will be applying her teaching talents in two sections of the MIND course, which continues to grow in popularity. We are very pleased that Katie has joined us.

This has been a very busy fall for the faculty. We have embarked on a search in the cognitive area and were very pleased to have received more than 250 applications for this position. We now are carefully reading the applications with the goal of selecting a few for campus visits early in the winter quarter. We hope that we will be welcoming a new faculty member to the Department as a result of this search.

Thanks to the work of our colloquium committee (Boaz Keysar, chair; Ed Awh, Susan Goldin-Meadow, and Jeni Kubota) we had two outstanding colloquia this fall, which added to the intellectual life of our Department. Our speakers included Michael Norton (Harvard University) and Stephen Mitroff (George Washington University). In addition, program area brownbag and colloquia sponsored by other units, including the Grossman Institute and the Committee on Education, continue to provide a rich set of learning opportunities for students and faculty in Psychology.

As you will read in the newsletter, two faculty members in our Department were recently recognized by very special honors. In April 2017, Susan Goldin-Meadow delivered the Nora and Edward Ryerson Lecture, discussing her seminal work on language and gesture. Her spectacular lecture was followed by a celebratory dinner, which was very well attended by students, faculty, and community members. The Ryerson Lecturer is selected by a faculty committee to be awarded to a faculty member based on research findings of lasting significance. They indeed made a fabulous choice in selecting Susan Goldin-Meadow to receive this honor. More recently, John Cacioppo was awarded the Tiffany and Margaret Blake Phoenix Prize, a prize that has only been awarded to four other faculty members in the Social Sciences in 23 years since its inception – James Coleman, Marshall Sahlins, Gary Becker, and Robert Lucas. This Phoenix Prize is awarded to a faculty member whose research has truly shaped the field and fittingly honors John Cacioppo’s groundbreaking research and influence on the fields of psychology and neuroscience and his founding of the field of social neuroscience. The faculty in the Department enjoyed toasting John at a celebratory dinner along with other invited guests from across the University and throughout the country.

In closing, I wish you all joyous holidays and a happy, healthy, productive and fulfilling 2018. I encourage you to keep in touch, to share news with us, and to stop by the Department for a visit or to attend a talk. The door is always open, and we are happy to hear from our departmental alumni and friends.