Student Awards

April 28, 2025

Minci Zhang, who is one of our graduate students in David Schwartz’s lab. Minci received the Dornsife Summer Research Award. It is also known as the Gold Family Fellowship.

This Fellowship is awarded to outstanding graduate students on the basis of academic promise.

Congratulations Minci on a well-deserved award!

April 23, 2025

Please join me in congratulating the students below on receiving the Excellence in Scientific Writing 2025 from the Department of Psychology. Each area chose one PhD 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 will be awarded a $100 prize.

Developmental Psychology: Wani Qiu

Brain and Cognitive Science: Armin Bazarjani

Social Psychology: Drew Gorenz

Clinical Science: Sarah Zapetis

Quantitative Methods & Computational Psychology: Kevin Kapadia

April 22, 2025

Emily Satinsky (the Clinical Science Program at USC) received the P.E.O. Scholar Award for 2025. This is a highly selective and prestigious award.

The P.E.O. Scholar Awards support women who are changing the world through the pursuit of a doctoral-level degree by providing them with merit-based awards to assist in the success of their educational goals. With approximately 6,000 chapters across the U.S. and Canada, the P.E.O. Sisterhood supports the higher education of almost a quarter of a million women.

Congratulations to Emily on a well-deserved award.

April 21, 2025

Elayne Zhou was awarded the General Education Graduate Assistant Award. This is for her contribution to the GE program during the Fall 2023 through Spring 2024 academic year.

March 5, 2025

Please join us in congratulating our graduate student Morgan Lynch on receiving the Russell Endowed Dissertation Completion Fellowship form USC Graduate School. Morgan is in Dr. Chris Beam’s lab. Congratulations Morgan on a well-deserved award.

January 13, 2025

Laura Fenton was awarded the International Neuropsychological Society Graduate Student research award! She will receive the award in person at the awards ceremony on Wednesday from 5:30-6:30pm at INS for her abstract on Associations Between Brain Morphology, Cognitive Function, and Financial Exploitation Vulnerability in Older Adults. Congratulations Laura!

December 11, 2024

PhD student Jenna Blyler won second prize for her poster at the Society for Risk Analysis! Her co-authors are Aitor Marcos, Leah Tieger, Richard John, and Joe Arvai. The poster is called “Toxic soups and silver spoons: How health and wealth predict risk perceptions near a radioactive superfund site”

Congrats to Jenna and her co-author team!

August 1, 2024

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.

April 30, 2024

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!

March 10, 2024

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

February 24, 2024

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.

December 24, 2023

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.

May 24, 2023

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.

April, 2023

Please join us in congratulating the students below on receiving the Excellence in Scientific Writing 2023 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: Minci Zhang
Brain and Cognitive Science: Jungwon Min
Social Psychology: Joshua Inwald
Clinical Science: Ellie Xu
Quantitative Methods & Computational Psychology: Winnie Tse

October 24, 2022

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.