Isiaah Crawford, PhD, will become the next president of the University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington, later this year. Crawford, a clinical psychologist, will be the university's first African-American president. He is currently the provost of Seattle University; prior to that he was chair of the psychology department and dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Loyola University Chicago.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force has named Susan J. Curry, PhD, as its vice chair. The task force is appointed by the director of the federal Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality and makes evidence-based recommendations about clinical preventive services that can improve Americans health, such as cancer screenings, counseling services and preventive medicines. APA is a dissemination and implementation partner of the task force. Curry is dean of the College of Public Health and a distinguished professor of health management and policy at the University of Iowa.
Washington College has named Cynthia Gibson, PhD, as the first Dr. Carol C. Culp Chair in Psychology. H. Lawrence Culp Jr., chair of the college's Board of Visitors and Governors, endowed the chair to honor his mother — a psychologist who died in 2010 — through a $2 million gift to the college. The position recognizes the leadership and service of the department chair, as well as the department's hands-on learning curriculum and commitment to student-led research.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association and the U.S. Department of Defense have awarded a $400,000 grant to psychologists Ann H. Huffman, PhD, and Heidi A. Wayment, PhD, of Northern Arizona University, to study concussion-reporting behavior among NCAA college football players. Working with two faculty from the university's athletic training department, Huffman and Wayment will study how organizational culture and other factors affect concussion-reporting among athletes, coaches and staff. They also plan to develop intervention strategies to increase athlete safety and well-being. The study will be conducted over two and a half years and involve four different NCAA Division I football programs.
Terence M. Keane, PhD, of the VA Boston Healthcare System, has received the 2015 John B. Barnwell Award, the VA's highest scientific honor, which recognizes accomplishments in areas most important to its research mission. Keane was honored for his work in PTSD assessment, diagnosis and treatment. He is a professor of psychiatry and assistant dean for research at Boston University, and director of the Behavioral Science Division of the National Center for PTSD.
The American Sociological Association has awarded Tom Pettigrew, PhD, its Cox-Johnson-Frazier award for lifetime contributions to the study of American race relations. Pettigrew is a professor emeritus of social psychology at the University of California Santa Cruz. He has spent more than five decades studying racial prejudice in the United States, Australia, Europe and South Africa.
White House honors three psychologists
Three psychologists received a Presidential Early Career Award in February. The annual award is the U.S. government's highest honor given to early-career science and engineering professionals. Awardees, who are funded by or work for participating agencies, are selected for their innovative research and community service.
Tina Goldstein, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, studies the assessment and psychosocial treatment of youth for adolescents with and at risk for bipolar disorder. She also studies the association between suicide and sleep disturbances in youth with bipolar disorder, as well as substance use and suicide prevention in this population.
Dan McCloskey, PhD, a professor at the College of Staten Island, studies the highly social African naked mole-rat to understand which parts of the brain are involved in ordinary social behavior, and how these systems are implicated in such diseases as epilepsy and autism. Using high-performance computers that monitor interactions and brain activity, he researches how early life experiences might cause subtle alterations in brain development, leading to an increased likelihood of abnormal brain activity and learning deficits.
Todd Gureckis, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at New York University. His research blends human cognition, learning science and machine learning, comparing human behavior to intelligent machine learning algorithms to discover the core building blocks of human cognition that make us uniquely smart and adaptable learners.
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