Nicholas Grant, PhD, is the new president-elect of GLMA: Health Professionals Advancing LGBTQ Equality. He will be the first psychologist and nonphysician to serve as president when he takes the helm in 2021. Grant is a U.S. Navy lieutenant and active duty clinical psychologist based at Navy Medical Center San Diego. Prior to that, he was GLMA’s vice president for external affairs.
Joshua Tenenbaum, PhD, a cognitive scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has won a MacArthur Foundation “Genius” Grant. Tenenbaum, a faculty member in the department of brain and cognitive sciences and a principal investigator in the Center for Brains, Minds and Machines and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence (AI) Laboratory, studies human learning, reasoning and perception by combining computational models with behavioral experiments. He’s also exploring ways to bring AI closer to the capabilities of human thinking. Hundreds of science and engineering teams worldwide use the machine learning and AI algorithms his team has developed.
The lieutenant governor of Ontario, Canada, by order-in-council, has appointed J. Gilles Boulais, PhD, CPsych, to the Ontario Review Board. The board is made up of judges, lawyers, psychologists and psychiatrists who review the status of accused parties who have been found to be unfit to stand trial or not criminally responsible for an offense due to a mental illness. Boulais is a clinical and consulting psychologist in Ottawa with 40 years of experience in psychotherapy and psycholegal consultation and assessments.
David Cates, PhD, has been appointed vice chair of clinical operations in the department of psychiatry at the University of Nebraska Medical Center—a role traditionally filled by a psychiatrist. Cates also directs behavioral health at Nebraska Medicine, a network of over 800 beds and more than 40 specialty and primary-care health centers. He also led the development of the Behavioral Health Connection program in Omaha, a free service that connects people with behavioral health and social service programs.
Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf has named University of Pennsylvania psychology professor Angela Duckworth, PhD, a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania, an annual honor presented to Pennsylvania women who demonstrate exceptional service to their communities. Known internationally for her research on grit, Duckworth is also the founder and CEO of Character Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing scientific insights that help kids thrive.
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has named Ivory Toldson, PhD, to the Commission on the Value of Postsecondary Education, a panel sponsored by the foundation and the Institute for Higher Education Policy that is examining the economic returns of a high school education. Toldson is a counseling psychology professor at Howard University and president and CEO of Quality Education for Minorities, a nonprofit dedicated to improving the education of African Americans, Alaska Natives, American Indians, Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans.
The International Society for Self and Identity has presented its Distinguished Lifetime Career Award to Brenda Major, PhD, a distinguished professor in the department of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The prize honors Major’s decades of research on resilience and how people protect their identities in the face of threats.