Ann Huffman, PhD, and Heidi Wayment, PhD, of Northern Arizona University, have received a $1.4 million Department of Defense grant to support their research on the psychological health and well-being of military personnel. The duo is using the funding to develop an app-based intervention designed to help service members cope with the stressors of military life and work, such as separation from family and frequent relocation.
Last month, the Gerontological Society of America presented its Richard Kalish Innovative Publication Award to Frank Infurna, PhD, an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University, and its Robert W. Kleemeier Award to Keith E. Whitfield, PhD, provost and psychology professor at Wayne State University. Infurna won for his 2017 article "The Multidimensional Nature of Resilience to Spousal Loss" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which reported that people show less resilience after the death of a spouse than was previously thought. Whitfield, an expert on aging among African-Americans, was recognized for his research on the biobehavioral aspects of cognitive aging and his mentorship of up-and-coming scholars in minority aging.
The Constitutional Accountability Center has honored Associate Executive Director of Practice, Legal and Regulatory Affairs Shirley Ann Higuchi, JD, for her work with the Heart Mountain Wyoming Foundation and its interpretive center, which are dedicated to education about the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during World War II at Heart Mountain in Wyoming. Higuchi, whose parents were incarcerated at Heart Mountain as children, chairs the foundation’s board and led the organization in creating the Japanese American Confinement Sites Consortium, a group dedicated to preserving the history of the Japanese-American incarceration experience.
The MacArthur Foundation has presented a $625,000 MacArthur Fellowship award to Kristina R. Olson, PhD, of the University of Washington, for her research on the social and cognitive development of transgender and gender-nonconforming youth. The prestigious fellowship recognizes scholars doing innovative work with the potential to make an important contribution to society. Olson is the director of the TransYouth Project, a national large-scale, longitudinal study of transgender children.
Rena F. Subotnik, PhD, was the featured speaker for the National Institute of Education’s 2018 Higher Degrees Distinguished Speaker Series at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Subotnik, who directs APA’s Center for Psychology in Schools and Education, presented five lectures for the series on how higher education can nurture students’ talent to enable them to tackle 21st-century problems and how institutions can encourage meaningful intervention research.
The American Association for the Advancement of Science has presented its Golden Goose Award to Mahzarin Banaji, PhD, of Harvard University, Anthony Greenwald, PhD, of the University of Washington, and Brian Nosek, PhD, of the University of Virginia, for their Implicit Association Test for implicit bias—the unconscious beliefs people hold about gender, race, sexuality and more. Their work has been cited in more than 2,000 research articles, and schools, law enforcement and many other organizations now use implicit bias research to guide their efforts to combat bias in their work. The annual award honors federally funded research that sounded obscure at first but has resulted in significant benefits to society.
