Social Sciences

Iony Ezawa, assistant professor of psychology, received the Marna Barrett Award for Excellence in Psychotherapy at the Society for Psychotherapy Research Annual Meeting held in Dublin this summer. The award, which includes a $10,000 prize, recognizes and supports “research excellence for the study of psychotherapeutic treatments of mental disorders that disrupt lives and inhibit the pursuit of well-being.” Ezaway received the award in part for her commitment to improving mental health treatment, supervision and training and her track record of scholarly excellence without large-scale funding.

Henrike Moll, associate professor of psychology, has earned the 2023 American Psychological Foundation Joseph B. Gittler Award. The prize, which includes $4,500, recognizes psychologists who make and are expected to continue making scholarly contributions to the philosophical foundations of psychological knowledge.

Christian Grose, professor of political science and public policy, has received the Alan Rosenthal Prize from the American Political Science Association. The prize, awarded annually, is meant to encourage young scholars to study questions that are important to legislators and legislative staff and to conduct research that could strengthen the practice of representative democracy. The association cited Grose’s journal article Social Lobbying, which he co-authored with his former PhD student Sara Sadhwani, who is now at Pomona College, Pamela Lopez of K Street Consulting and Antoine Yoshinaka of the University at Buffalo. The article won the Joseph Bernd Award earlier this year.

Rhacel Parreñas, Florence Everline Professor of Sociology and professor of sociology and gender studies, has received the 2023 Distinguished Scholarly Book Prize from the American Sociological Association. The award recognizes her book, Unfree: Migrant Domestic Work in Arab States (Stanford University Press, 2021), which the society says “breathes new life into old debates on the nature of freedom and offers a clear-eyed portrayal of the realities of subordinated labor around the globe and the resilience of migrant women seeking dignity and self-determination.”

Hajar Yazdiha, assistant professor of sociology, has been a CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholarin CIFAR’s Boundaries, Membership & Belonging program. Yazdiha is among 16 distinguished, early-career researchers joining the prestigious program for the 2023–25 period. The program provides $100,000 of unrestricted research funding over two years to scholars addressing significant and urgent scientific and societal challenges.

Ann Owens, professor of sociology, public policy and spatial sciences, has won the 2022 William Julius Wilson Early Career Award from the American Sociological Association’s Section on Inequality, Poverty and Mobility. Bestowed annually, the award recognizes a scholar who has made major contributions early in their career.

Jacques Hymans, associate professor of international relations, has earned a Fulbright-Hays Faculty Research Abroad Fellowship. His project under the fellowship, which takes place from May to December in affiliation with the University of Tokyo, will focus on understanding the uneven success of Japan’s efforts to expand its reliance on a wide range of renewable energies since the Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant disaster of March 2011.

Christian Grose, professor of political science and public policy, received the 2023 Joseph L. Bernd JOP Best Paper Award for his article “Social Lobbying” published last year in The Journal of Politics. Grose’s co-authors were Sara Sadhwani, his former PhD student now at Pomona College, Pamela Lopez of K Street Consulting and Antoine Yoshinaka of the University at Buffalo.

On April 2, the Joint Educational Project (JEP) STEM Education Programs hosted a teacher professional development opportunity focused on neurobiology. This workshop was in partnership with neurobiologist Sarah Bottjer, professor of biological sciences and psychology, whose research focuses on brain-behavior relationships in songbirds. The workshop was supported by a National Science Foundation grant titled “The Role of Cortico-Basal Ganglia Circuits in Skill Learning During Development.”