Administrative Updates & Announcements

We are pleased to welcome a new staff member to PsyIT – Ben Cowper. Ben will be the contact person for Moodle, Canvas, Mediasite, Drupal and all things instructional technology related. Stop by when you can, and help us welcome Ben to the Department!

Awards & Accomplishments

Professor Mark Snyder, McKnight Presidential Chair in Psychology, presented the Distinguished Scholar Lecture for the Minnesota Psychological Association on October 4, 2017, at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN.  The topic of his lecture was "Caring, Concern, and Community Connection: New Directions in the Study of Pro-Social Action".

Graduated

Congratulations to our recent Department of Psychology Ph.D graduates!

Awards & Accomplishments

Alumnus Dr. Matt Winslow (advisor Mark Snyder, 1998) has received the 2017 Acorn Award for Teaching Excellence for his work at Eastern Kentucky University. The Acorn Award is the highest honor for teaching excellence presented by the Kentucky Council on Postsecondary Education and co-sponsored by Kentucky colleges and universities. 

Grants

Administrative Updates & Announcements

We are pleased to announce that Rachel Goeller has accepted the offer for the position of Associate Director of Graduate Studies. Rachel has been working in the department for the last eight years, more recently as an administrative assistant for Instruction and Graduate Program.

If you need assistance with anything related to educational technology, please contact us at help@umn.edu with the subject FOR T2 CLA PSYC, stop by N211 Elliott, or give us a call at 612-626-7531.

Awards & Accomplishments

Professor Gordon Legge presented a keynote address at Vision 2017, a triennial international conference devoted to research on low vision. The conference was held in The Hague from June 25-29. Gordon participated in the opening ceremony along with Princess Margriet of the Netherlands.

Professor Mark Snyder, McKnight Presidential Chair in Psychology, and his research on volunteerism and other forms of pro-social action are featured in an interview with EPOCA, Brazil's weekly news magazine. Here is a link to the article. (FYI - the Chrome browser will translate the interview from Portuguese to English)

Psychology graduate students Julia Longenecker, Lauren Mitchell, Viann Nguyen-Feng, and Melinda Schreiner have been awarded the Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship for 2017-2018.

I/O psychology area graduate Brenton Wiernik (Advisors: Deniz Ones and John Campbell) received an honorable mention for the University of Minnesota Best Dissertation Award. His thesis was titled “The Nomological Network of Classic and Contemporary Career Preferences”. Brenton is currently a post-doc at Ghent University, funded by the Belgian American Educational Foundation.

Ying-Zi Xiong, a postdoctoral research associate, working with Gordon Legge on studies of vision and reading was the recipient of the Best Poster Award at Vision 2017, the triennial international conference on low-vision research, held in The Hague, Netherlands, in June.

Grants

Professor Deniz Ones received a multi-million dollar grant to direct a field study to develop mobile sensor technology to predict and measure job performance. Read more here.

Associate Professor Moin Syed (along with Katrice Albert, Toyia Younger, Samuel B. Mukasa, and Robert B. McMaster) has been awarded a $3.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to continue the work of the Northstar STEM Alliance, a consortium of Minnesota colleges and universities focused on increasing the college graduation rates of under-represented ethnic minority students in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors.

NSF has awarded a five-year predoctoral training grant to a program jointly sponsored by the Center for Cognitive Sciences (CCS) and the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science (CATSS). The program is called “Graduate training program in sensory science: Optimizing the information available for mind and brain.” The PI is Professor Victoria Interrante (Computer Science), with co-PIs professors Peggy Nelson (Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences), Andrew Oxenham (Psychology) and Gordon Legge (Psychology). The goal of this training program is to unite a fundamental understanding of basic sensory science (vision, audition, motor control, speech and language) with deep technical expertise in engineering, computer science, and other related fields. The program is expected to enroll six to eight trainees each year.

Visiting Scholars

Bengianni Pizzirani, a graduate student from Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, is visiting during the fall 2017 semester to work with Jeff Simpson's lab group. He is being funded by an Endeavor Scholarship.

Upcoming Events

Wondering what you can do with your major in Psychology?
You're not alone! Visit the PsyCareer Exploration Fair to talk to alumni about various psychology career pathways. Stop by as your schedule allows! Light refreshments provided.

When: September 20th, 2017 6-7pm
Where: Elliott Hall N219
RSVP.

Administrative Updates & Announcements

Esther Maruani accepted a position as an Academic Technologist at the Carlson School of Management. Her last day with the Department of Psychology was July 17th.

Requests for support for web changes, Moodle changes, and videotaping: please send an email to help@umn.edu with the subject line <FOR T2 CLA PSYC>. One of us from PsyIT will respond to you as soon as we can.

WiFi: The UM Twin cities upgraded the wireless network over the summer. This should lead to improved performance. It also means that eduroam is the preferred wireless access point on campus rather than UMSecure. To login to eduroam use your full UM email address <user@umn.edu> and your email password.
A bonus of the eduroam network is that the UM eduroam is connected to other wireless networks across universities across the world. If you can get on eduroam in another country, it is as if you are on eduroam here.
Read more.

Awards & Accomplishments

Regents Professor Bill Iacono was given the Dobzhansky Award for outstanding lifetime contributions to Behavior Genetics at the June 2017 meeting of the Behavior Genetics Association in Oslo, Norway. Congratulations to Bill on this honor! Prior recipients from our department are Tom Bouchard, Irv Gottesman, and Matt McGue.

Upcoming Events

Administrative Updates & Announcements

Lindsey Jendraszak’s last day was June 16^th, 2017 as Associate Director of Graduate Studies. Rachel Goeller has assumed her duties on an interim basis. 

Awards & Accomplishments

Newly promoted Associate Professor Chun Wang has been selected by the Provost’s Office as a McKnight Presidential Fellow, an award given this year to five newly tenured faculty members in consideration of their prior accomplishments. She will hold the title for a three-year period and will receive some research funding during the period of the award.

Graduated

Congratulations to our recent Department of Psychology Ph. D graduates!

Grants

Research Associate Professor, Magdalena Wojtczak, has been awarded a new 5-year grant by the National Institutes of Health to study the function and perceptual consequences of efferent cochlear activation, or how bottom-up and top-down processes affect how the ear processes sound.

Administrative Updates & Announcements

The spring, 2017 issue of Sentience, the journal for undergraduate research in Psychology at the U of M, is now available online at www.psych.umn.edu/sentience. Manuscripts published in the journal were authored by undergraduate students and peer-reviewed by fellow undergraduates. Check out the latest research publications from some of our students and browse past issues.

Awards & Accomplishments

Professor Yuhong Jiang received the 2017 Outstanding Advising and Mentoring award from The Council of Graduate Students (COGS). Nominations and selections of winners are made by graduate students and the COGS.

Professor Mark Snyder, McKnight Presidential Chair in Psychology, and his research on self-monitoring and leadership in organizations are featured in the article "Why You Shouldn't 'Be Yourself' at Work" in the BBC.com online magazine "Capital". 

Congratulations to CLA third year psychology student Troy Yamaguchi, who has been recently selected as a 2017 Cargill Global Scholar. The Cargill Global Scholar Program offers scholarship and leadership training to students who study in a field relevant to Cargill's world of food, agriculture and risk management, demonstrating exemplary academic achievement and leadership potential.
In June, Yamaguchi will join nine other scholars selected for the program's fifth cohort in the U.S. for a three-day leadership development seminar, where he'll receive training in a variety of business and leadership skills, tour Cargill's Food Innovation Center, and get to meet the Cargill business leaders who will serve as his mentor for the next year. For students who are interested to the program, please see more information in the link and video.
 

Awards & Accomplishments

Professor Robert Krueger worked with colleagues on a new study that suggests psychologists could do better than the DSM. They developed the Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (HiTOP),that should address the DSM's shortfalls. Read the article here. 

Upcoming Events

Did you miss the RSVP Deadline? We still invite you to attend the annual recognition celebration for psychology undergraduate students being held this Friday, May 5th, 2017.

This annual event recognizes our outstanding undergraduate achievements and graduating seniors. Event will be held from 4:00pm to 6:00pm at the Campus Club, Coffman Memorial Union. Please forward any questions to Mike Houlahan, mhoulaha@umn.edu.

Faculty and Staff, please RSVP via our web form here. Thank you for your support of our undergraduate students!

Awards & Accomplishments

Professor Eugene Borgida was invited on March 21, 2017, to address the Minnesota Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. As a member of the Policy-Makers/Judiciary Panel, his talk addressed "Can bias or prejudice-reduction programs lead to persisting change in policing?" The Commission panels were held at the University of St. Thomas Law School.

Professor Christopher Federico coauthored a Washington Post story explaining President Trump’s support as a form of “collective narcissism.” 

Professor Monica Luciana was selected to receive a Distinguished McKnight University Professorship. This is a tremendous honor that is given to outstanding mid-career scholars at the University of Minnesota. In addition to the title, Monica will receive a monetary award to be used to further her research and career.

Professor Traci Mann discusses results of a study where vegetables were presented to kids before lunch (when they were quite hungry) in this story of how schools are succeeding in increasing the quantity of vegetables kids eat at school in the Wall Street Journal.

Professor Jeffry Simpson was received an award for Outstanding Contributions to Graduate and Professional Education. Read more about it here.

Associate Professor Bonnie Klimes-Dougan was named incoming Associate Editor for Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology

Dr. Rachael Klein (2015 UMN Psychology Ph.D., I-O area), Dr. Stephan Dilchert (2008 UMN Psychology Ph.D., I-O area), and Professor  Deniz Ones (I-O area), along with their co-author Kelly Dages have been named the 2017 recipients of the Jeanneret Award for Excellence in the Study of Individual or Group Assessment by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. The award is for their article "Cognitive Predictors and Age-Based Adverse Impact Among Business Executives", published in the Journal of Applied Psychology

Graduate student Sha Li received the student travel award from the Vision Sciences Society (VSS). VSS selected 20 awardees among 200+ applicants this year. Sha will be traveling to the annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society in May 2017 to present her research on visual attention with Prof. Yuhong Jiang and Adjunct Prof. Roger Remington.

Michelle Thai, a graduate student in the CSPR program, was awarded a MnDRIVE Fellowship in Neuromodulation for 2017/2018 year. She will be mentored by Bonnie Klimes-Dougan and Kathryn Cullen.

Undergraduate senior Selena Wang (mentored by Professor Deniz Ones and recent I-O area graduate Dr. Brenton Wiernik) received the Minnesota Psychological Association's Paterson Award. The Paterson Award is presented to honor a student with superior academic achievement and potential for further work in psychology. Selena has worked with Deniz and Brenton for two years researching measurement equivalence for vocational interest assessments across racial, gender, and language groups. She will present two papers on this research at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology conference in April. In the fall, Selena will enter the Quantitative Psychology Ph.D. program at The Ohio State University.  

Graduated

Congratulations to our recent Department of Psychology Ph. D graduates!

Grants

Assistant Professor Chun Wang (co-PI) and Gongjun Xu (PI) from the University of Michigan have been awarded a three-year grant from NSF to study the Cognitive Diagnosis Models with specific focus on model identification, estimation, and applications. This family of models have wide applications in education, psychology, and health domains.

Upcoming Events

Graduate Panel April 20th from 3-4:15 pm in N219 Elliott Hall.
This program would be great for those students who are considering a RESEARCH based graduate school. Come hear from our Associate Director of Grad Studies Lindsey Jendraszak on what makes a competitive applicant for research based grad programs. You'll also hear from a panel of graduate students at the U of M in various research areas to better learn about their process of applying to research based graduate schools, reaching out to faculty about their research, and everything in-between!
Space is limited Please RSVP Today here.

Faculty and graduating doctoral students should save the date for the department's PhD Graduation Celebration, which will be held from 4-6 PM on Thursday, April 27th at the Campus Club. The celebration is open to any PhD student who graduated within the past year or who will graduate by the end of December 2017.

Awards and Accomplishments

Professor Traci Mann spoke with Today on why your diet fails you, which can be found here.

Professor Jeffry Simpson's research on the impact of early life experiences on adult physical health was covered here in Scientia, which features cutting-edge research in science.

Associate Professor Mark Thomas was featured in the U of M Brief highlighting his work on finding a neural “switch” that can turn off relapse behavior. You may find the article here.

Graduated

Congratulations to our recent Department of Psychology Ph. D graduates!

Grants

Professor Andrew Oxenham has been awarded a 5-year $1.6M grant to study pitch perception in people with normal hearing and cochlear implants. Pitch is crucial for music but also plays a major role in understanding speech, particularly in noisy backgrounds.  Understanding more about pitch coding and perception should improve our ability to transmit pitch information via devices such as cochlear implants.

Research Associate Professor Magdalena Wojtczak has been awarded a 5-year $1.2M grant from NIH to study cochlear synaptopathy. This condition, referred to as "hidden hearing loss" because it cannot be detected with today's clinical tests, has been identified in animals who were exposed to high noise levels. The new research will develop clinical tests to diagnose the condition in humans and will explore how it affects everyday hearing, along with its relationship to tinnitus. Hearing loss with age and tinnitus are both major health problems in the US.

Upcoming Events

Please mark your calendars and plan to attend the annual recognition celebration for psychology undergraduate students, which will be held Friday, May 5th, 2017. This annual event recognizes our outstanding undergraduate achievements and graduating seniors. The event will be held from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm at the Campus Club, Coffman Memorial Union. Please forward any questions to Mike Houlahan, mhoulaha@umn.edu. Faculty and Staff, please RSVP via our web form here.

Thank you for your support of our undergraduate students!

Administrative Updates & Announcements

We are pleased to welcome a new staff member to our Undergraduate Advising Office – Mary Simonsen. Mary comes to us from CLA Advising. Stop by when you can, and help us welcome Mary to the Department!

As a result of the recent University Risk Assessment, the Department has been advised to provide periodic reminders regarding the 'reporting' of suspected information security issues. Please take a moment to review the procedure, which can be found here.

The latest issue of Sentience, the journal for undergraduate research in Psychology at the U of M, is now available online. Please check out the recent research papers of some of our undergraduates, peer-reviewed by fellow undergraduates, here.

Awards and Accomplishments

Bruce Overmier, emeritus faculty, was nominated by the US National Academy of Sciences has been appointed to the joint International Council of Science (ICSU) and International Social Science Council "Transition Task Force" that will manage the merger of the two organizations.

Recent graduate Brenton Wiernik (advisee of Deniz Ones and John Campbell) received a postdoctoral fellowship from the Belgian American Educational Foundation to research at the University of Ghent.

Graduated

Congratulations to our recent Department of Psychology Ph. D graduates!

Brenton Wiernik
Area: I/O
Advisors: Deniz Ones and John Campbell
Dissertation: The Nomological Network of Classic and Contemporary Career Preferences

Krista Wisner
Area: CSPR
Advisor: Angus MacDonald
Dissertation: An Investigation Into The Neural Nature Of Persecutory Ideation

Grants

Scott Sponheim is launching a multi-million dollar Connectome project entitled "Neural Disconnection and Errant Visual Perception in Psychotic Psychopathology". Co-investigators and consultants from the Psychology department are Cheryl Olman, Angus MacDonald, Steve Engel and Nate Helwig. This project will enroll 300 participants for multiple clinical visits and scanning sessions, at 3T and 7T, over the next 4 years, with the ultimate goal of using computational models of visual processing to providing better delineation of neural mechanisms involved in psychosis.

Kamil Ugurbil and Cheryl Olman have received a multiple-PI BRAIN Initiative R01 entitled "Neurons, vessels, and Voxels: multi-modal imaging of layer specific signals". This project is a collaboration with Prakash Kara and Thomas Naselaris at the Medical University of South Carolina that will use 2-photon microscopy in cats to measure stimulated neural activity and vessel dilation in primary visual cortex and then use computational models to link the 2-photon data to fMRI data acquired in cats (at 9.4T and 16.4T) and humans (at 7T and 10.5T).