Campaign to Transform the Future: Progress to date
Donors to the Campaign to Transform the Future enable APF to provide opportunities for graduate students and early career psychologists with support for their innovative projects and groundbreaking research. To learn more about the campaign and to donate, visit APFopens in new window.
Chen's research explores mental health treatment for Chinese-American immigrants
The AAPA-APF Okura Mental Health Leadership Foundation has awarded $20,000 to Stephen Chen, PhD, assistant professor in the Wellesley College department of psychology, for his project, "Parental Self-Regulation and Emotion Language: New Targets for Mental Health Interventions in Low-SES Chinese American Immigrant Families."
The AAPA-APF Okura Mental Health Leadership Foundation Fellowship increases understanding, treatment, services, and training to help generate a healthy, robust and high achieving Asian-American/Pacific Islander population.
Chen's project will build on his existing partnership with the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center to examine stress and family well-being in low-income Chinese-American immigrant families. After collaborating with the center, Chen will use his empirical research findings to directly inform interventions with families that the center serves. Chen's study will directly address the Okura Fellowship's goals of research, provider training and direct service to the Asian-American/Pacific Islander community.
Nicholas Turk-Browne receives the 2014 APF Robert L. Fantz Award
APF has recognized Nicholas Turk-Brown, PhD, with its 2014 Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award for his important contributions to the understanding of statistical learning, predictive coding and event representation in perception and memory. His work has direct implications for perceptual-cognitive development and the development of selective attention, which the Fantz Award seeks to recognize.
Turk-Browne, an associate psychology professor at Princeton University, graduated from Yale with 16 refereed journal publications. He continued to publish innovative work as an associate professor in first-tier journals such as Nature, Neuroscience, Psychological Science and the Journal of Neuroscience. With a citation rate of more than 1,000, Turk-Browne is already viewed as a leader in the field.
The Robert L. Fantz Memorial Award for Young Psychologists encourages and supports careers of promising young investigators in psychology or related disciplines working in perceptual-cognitive development and the development of selective attention; and research and writing on the development of individuality, creativity and free-choice of behavior.
Grantee Spotlight: How to manage sexual identity in the workplace
In 2008, APF gave Eden King, PhD, and Jonathan Mohr, PhD, a $55,000 Wayne F. Placek Grant to examine the identity management strategies of lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) workers. Their work has shed new light on the complexity of this issue.
King and Mohr found that whether LGB workers reveal, conceal or signal their sexual orientation is determined by the anticipated reactions of their co-workers in specific situations and cannot be seen as one-time, yes-or-no decisions about whether to "come out." Their study described the challenges people face and pointed to important interpersonal and situational predictors of identity management behaviors in the workplace.
King and Mohr went on to receive $165,000 in subsequent funding, including grants from the Sloan Foundation Working Longer Program and the Sloan Work-Family Career Development Grant Award. A paper on the project is in press in the Journal of Management. King says the APF funding was career-changing. "The [Placek] grant allowed me to support multiple doctoral students and conduct a meaningful study that is published in a high-impact journal in my field. Together, these factors helped me to achieve tenure, establish a strong reputation, and develop a compelling program of research."
Campaign Donor Spotlight: Douglas C. Haldeman, PhD
In the late 1970s, before Douglas C. Haldeman, PhD became an influential figure in the psychological community, he was a high school drama teacher in San Francisco, just beginning a life as an activist alongside Harvey Milk and others. When Milk was assassinated, Haldeman felt he needed to give back and help his traumatized community. And that led him to psychology, "I found my mission — and my passion — in psychology," he says.
Today, Haldeman is a prominent practicing psychologist in Seattle. Recently, he returned to his initial love of teaching as the director of the clinical psychology program at John F. Kennedy University. Haldeman also works to advance psychology through many volunteer commitments, serving on APA's Council of Representatives, APA's Board of Directors, and as a trustee for The Trust.
Over his career, Haldeman has found many opportunities to "give psychology away" to others, such as his work at a summer camp in Sweden for gay men from all over the world who have been persecuted for their homosexuality. "Bringing psychological knowledge to the public for the betterment of society and the individual" is what matters most to him.
Haldeman's philanthropy bears out his dedication to the field. In the early 1990s, Haldeman was inspired to give to APF when Evelyn Hooker left a large gift from Wayne Placek to support research to increase the public's understanding of gay men and lesbians and to decrease their suffering from discrimination. In 2009, he made a major gift to psychology and this year, he gave $25,000 to APF's Campaign to Transform the Future. "It means so much to me to be able to participate — to have some small part in moving psychology forward, and creating a more inclusive, just society," he says.
Haldeman hopes that others will be inspired to give: "Don't think twice. You know there's nothing more important to the work that we do, the lives that we lead, and the vision that we have for our world."
