Awards and News

Please join us in congratulating Anthony Vaccaro on receiving the Society of Affective Science (SAS) Best Dissertation Award for 2024. Anthony is currently a post doc in Darby Saxbe’s lab, but he did his graduate work in Jonas Kaplan’s lab. The SAS committee received numerous exceptional nominations for the Award, but they were unanimous in selecting Anthony for this Award.

Please join us in congratulating Jennifer Vo, our graduate Academic Program Administrator, on the recognition of her contributions to USC Dornsife with a Spot Award. She was awarded a Dornsife Spot Award! Jasmine Yu nominated her for the award, and here is some of what she wrote:

“Jennifer has been an extremely helpful and supportive colleague! She is an amazing graduate advisor to her Psychology Ph.D. students and she helps promote my Ph.D. Academy resources and events to her students. On top of that, Jennifer has also taken on supporting Anthropology’s Ph.D. students. We have seen an increased attendance and engagement at our events thanks to her encouragement. I consider her a superstar in her role, always going above and beyond to support her students.”

Jennifer truly deserves this Award!

Congratulations Jennifer!

Please join us in congratulating the students below on receiving the Excellence in Scientific Writing 2024 from the Department of Psychology. Each area chooses one student from any year who has excelled in writing (a paper for publication, a conference presentation/poster, 2^nd year project, dissertation, etc.), in the past year. Each student was awarded a $100 prize.

Developmental Psychology: Wani Qiu

Brain and Cognitive Science: Sarah Hennessy

Social Psychology: Kevin Choi

Clinical Science: Morgan Lynch

Quantitative Methods & Computational Psychology: Meltem Ozcan

Congratulations on this recognition!  Also, compliments to the brilliant posters from our 3^rd year students who presented at the Department Poster Party on Jan 24th!

Congratulations to Ellie Gottesman for receiving the Dornsife Scholar Award. She is a participant in the Psychology Honors program working with Henrike Moll. The Dornsife Scholar Program, grants a few graduating seniors with $10,000 to be put toward graduate school costs. The award emphasizes impactful research and positive human impact on a global scale. More information about the award can be found here: https://dornsife.usc.edu/dornsife-scholars-program/.

Congratulations to Laura Fenton for receiving the Gold Family Fellowship Award in the amount of $5,000. This is awarded to a limited number of PhD candidates for research related to their dissertation. Gold Family Fellows are chosen on the basis of extraordinary academic promise.

Congratulations to Ian Anderson for receiving the USC Dornsife’s 2023 Communicator of the Year Award. This award honors scholars who contribute significant time and effort to meaningfully improve the public’s understanding of issues, influence policy, and/or raise the level of public discourse around research and scholarship conducted at Dornsife.

Asaf Mazar won the best student led paper in 2022 SPSP Student Publication Award for his paper: The Unintentional Nonconformist: Habits Promote Resistance to Social influence.

Dr. Iony Ezawa on received the very prestigious Marna Barrett Award for Excellence in Psychotherapy at the Society for Psychotherapy Research Annual Meeting held in Dublin, Ireland in the summer of 2023.

Congratulations to Henny Moll on receiving the 2023 American Psychological Foundation (APF) Joseph B. Gittler Award. This award is to recognize psychologists who are making and will continue to make scholarly contributions to the philosophical foundations of psychological knowledge.

Congratulations to Anthony Vaccaro. He is Darby Saxbe’s post-doc, and a former graduate student in our Department who did his graduate studies at the BCI (Antonio Damasio and Jonas Kaplan were his mentors). Anthony published a really interesting Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times about social media use and the brain, which also makes some more general points about the use of neuroscience in the media. It is not easy to get published in LA Times! So big congratulation to Anthony on this great accomplishment!

Learn more: Opinion: Are social media and smartphones rewiring kids’ brains? – Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)

Drew Gorenz was interviewed on ABC Australia about a conference talk presenting his research into the humor of ChatGPT.  Learn More: https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/sundayextra/how-funny-is-chatgpt-/103747152

Please join us in congratulating Joe Arvai on his lead story in The Conversation: What happens when AI decides for you.  It is a great and engaging article that addresses a very timely topic.

Check out Darby Saxbe’s Op-Ed out in the New York Times! She wrote about teen mental health treatment and the iatrogenic effects of some programs.

Hanna and Antonio Damasio were featured in a Q&A in Neuron. They discuss the value of single case studies for neuroscience, consciousness research and the limits of AI, and the fascinating relationship between creativity and the brain.

Morteza Dehghani’s group whose work has been cited in the new roadmap for future research on Information Integrity, recently released by the White House. The link is below, and the cited paper is (Mooijman, M., Hoover, J., Lin, Y., Ji, H., & Dehghani, M. (2018). Moralization in social networks and the emergence of violence during protests. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(6), 389-396.)

Dr. Antonio Damasio and Dr. Norbert Schwarz were named by Research.com in the “Top 200 Best Scientists” in the field of Psychology, worldwide.

Dr. Daphna Oyserman has been elected to the German National Academy of Science, Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher — Leopoldina (founded in 1652, which makes it the oldest learned society in continuous operation).