The International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology has presented its Early Career Award to Adriana Manago, PhD, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Manago won for her research on how the internet and social media are shaping our cultural and social development.
The National Science Foundation has named Lizanne DeStefano, PhD, as one of the inaugural members of the STEM Education Advisory Panel, a group created by Congress to encourage U.S. scientific and technological innovations in education and to guide the work of several federal organizations charged with improving STEM education. DeStefano is a professor of psychology and executive director of the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics and Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
The University of Oregon has named Janet Woodruff-Borden, PhD, vice provost and dean of its Graduate School. Woodruff-Borden was previously a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of Louisville and associate dean for graduate education in the school’s College of Arts and Sciences. Her research focuses on stress and anxiety in children.
Psychologists Julie Vieselmeyer, PhD, and Catherine Dempsey, PhD, were the top female finishers in the 40th Annual Running Psychologists "Ray’s Race" 5K Run and Walk held during APA’s Annual Convention in San Francisco in August. Vieselmeyer, a clinician at the Swedish Bariatric, Metabolic, Endocrine Center in Seattle, won "Fastest Female Runner," and Dempsey, a clinician at the Center for the Study of Traumatic Stress in Bethesda, Maryland, won "Fastest Female Walker." (Nonpsychologists Luke Wininger and Todd Schlueter won "Fastest Male Runner" and "Fastest Male Walker," respectively.)
APA has presented a Citizen Psychologist award to Perry Halkitis, PhD, which honors his advocacy for the rights of people with HIV and for the health of the LGBTQ community in the New York metropolitan area. Halkitis, who is dean of the School of Public Health at Rutgers University, collaborates with local agencies serving the LGBTQ community to translate research on HIV, drug abuse and mental health into programming. He has also worked with many hospitals and clinics to train health-care practitioners to effectively address the health disparities experienced by LGBTQ populations. Read more about the Citizen Psychologist initiative and the other psychologists APA has honored in the December Monitor and at https://bit.ly/CitizenPsych.
Thomas F. Pettigrew, PhD, of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Linda Tropp, PhD, of the University of Massachusetts Amherst, have won the Scientific Impact Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology for their 2006 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology article "A Meta-analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory." Their paper reported that intergroup contact tends to reduce prejudice and has been cited more than 5,600 times.
Piotr Oleksy, an 18-year-old student from Krakow, Poland, won the top prize in the International Brain Bee Championship, held during the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies’ Eleventh Forum for Neuroscience in Berlin in July. APA is one of the sponsors of the annual global competition, which tests students’ knowledge of neuroscience and encourages them to pursue careers in basic and clinical neuroscience.