Awards
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Jonathan Stange
Please join us in congratulating Jonathan Stange on receiving the SSCP Susan Nolen-Hoeksema Early Research Career Award. This award is a recognition of his contributions to the science of clinical psychology. This is a highly competitive award, and Jonathan’s earning of this award is well deserved.
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Anthony Vaccaro
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.
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Jennifer Vo
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!
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Excellence in Scientific Writing
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, 2nd 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 3rd year students who presented at the Department Poster Party on Jan 24th!
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Ellie Gottesman
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/.
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Laura Fenton
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.
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Ian Anderson
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.
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Asaf Mazar
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.
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Dr. Iony Ezawa
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.
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Dr. Henny Moll
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.
Katie Galbraith
Congratulations to Katie Galbraith on receiving the APA Dissertation Research Award for 2023. This is a prestigious award that Katie received in recognition of her promising contribution to psychological science. Katie is from the Clinical Area, and she worked with Stan Huey.
USC Psychology in the News
Morteza Dehghani
WHITE HOUSE PRESENTATION
Morteza Dehghani will be presenting his work on morally motivated hate at the White House at the end of May 2024.
“The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), along with the National Security Council (NSC) and the Domestic Policy Council (DPC), committed in the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism to launching an interagency effort to understand hate incidents and eliminate the impediments to recognizing, reporting, and preventing them. With support and leadership from the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, and the National Institutes of Health, this effort is intended to complement existing initiatives and investments aimed at improving our awareness of hate and bias-related incidents experienced by a diverse array of communities across the country with the goal of informing current and future evidence-based policies and programs.”
Congratulations to Morteza on the recognition of his research, and his being a part of this important initiative!
WHITE HOUSE REPORT FEATURE
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.)
Learn More: https://dornsife.usc.edu/psyc/wp-content/uploads/sites/81/2023/11/Roadmap-Information-Integrity-RD-2022.pdf
Anthony Vaccaro
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
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
Dr. Joe Arvai
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.
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Dr. Darby Saxbe
Check out Darby Saxbe’s Op-Eds out in the New York Times!
Opinion: Fatherhood Transforms Men’s Brains and Bodies – The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/16/opinion/dad-brain-fatherhood-parenting.html
Teen Mental Health Treatment and the Iatrogenic Effects of Some Programs
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/opinion/teenagers-mental-health-treatment.html
Dr. Antonio Damasio and Dr. Hanna Damasio
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.
Dr. Antonio Damasio and Dr. Norbert Schwarz
Dr. Antonio Damasio and Dr. Norbert Schwarz were named by Research.com in the “Top 200 Best Scientists” in the field of Psychology, worldwide.
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Dr. Daphna Oyserman
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).