Grantee Spotlight: Joey Fung
In 2013, Joey Fung, PhD, an early career psychologist at Fuller Graduate School of Psychology, received the $20,000 AAPA-APF Okura Mental Health Leadership Foundation Fellowship. She used the grant to conduct research on school-based mindfulness interventions for ethnic minority children and adolescents with anxiety.
"The APF grant made a significant impact on my research and career," says Fung.
Although her APF grant was the first of her postdoctoral career, it was not the last. Based on pilot data from her study, Fung received a grant from the Spencer Foundation to continue and expand the scope of the project. As her interest in mindfulness practices and culture grew, she received a planning grant from Templeton World Charity Foundation to investigate the effects of mindfulness meditation on empathy in young adults in the United States and Hong Kong.
"I am deeply thankful for receiving the AAPA-APF Okura Mental Health Leadership Foundation Fellowship, which was so instrumental in helping me launch related projects in the areas of culture, mindfulness, and mental health," she says.
APF donors support the next generation of psychological researchers, making possible a wide variety of innovative research, projects and intervention programs by graduate students and early career psychologists. In this final year of APF's Campaign to Transform the Future, donors are making a tremendous impact on the field, now and in the future.
Donor Spotlight: Seymour and Norma Feshbach
Psychology has played an enormous role in the lives of the Feshbachs, who met in a psychology class in 1947.
Seymour Feshbach, PhD, and his wife Norma D. Feshbach, PhD, have affirmed their commitment to the field of psychology with a major gift to APF's Campaign to Transform the Future.
In the late 1940s, Seymour and Norma Feshbach were both drawn to the expanding field of psychology. They met in a social psychology class at the City College of New York in 1947 and married several months later. Both were drawn to a life in academia, teaching students while also pursuing their own research. This eventually led them both to UCLA, where they would work until retirement.
Psychology has been important to the Feshbach family — their daughter Laura Feshbach, their late son Jonathan Bloom-Feshbach, and his wife Sally Bloom-Feshbach all received PhDs in psychology — and they wanted to give back.
"We are pleased that although we are not wealthy," says Seymour Feshbach, "we are able to contribute to the career of an aspiring psychologist." Norma Feshbach adds, "The reasons behind our gift are a responsibility and desire to support the efforts of the younger members of the psychological community."
