Graduate Students Win APA Early Career Competition and Receive Travel Awards

April, 2012

Monika Stojek (Clinical Program graduate student), Josh Gray (Clinical Program graduate student), and Michael Amlung (Behavioral and Brain Sciences Program graduate student) were selected from among a national pool of applicants to participate in the Early Career Poster Session at the 2012 APA Convention in Orlando. As part of this prestigious honor, each will receive a $750 travel award supported by NIAAA and NIDA to cover expenses associated with attending the convention.

Congratulations to Freya Liu (left) and Michael Amlung (right) for being honored with the Excellence in Research and the Excellence in Teaching Awards, respectively. These are two of the highest awards given annually by UGA to a select number of graduate students campus-wide. A recent Ph.D. graduate of the Behavioral and Brain Sciences Program, Freya's innovative research with Capuchin monkeys has made important contributions to the areas of cognition and tool use and in non-human primates. Her work with Dr.

Dr. Jennifer McDowell Receives UGA Mentoring Award

Congratulations to Dr. Jennifer McDowell of the Behavioral and Brain Sciences Program for receiving one of the 2012 Outstanding Mentoring Awards from the UGA Graduate School. This award is given annually to two faculty members who display innovation and effectiveness in mentoring graduate students during their educational experience. This honor recognizes Dr. McDowell's commitment to her students and her efforts to foster their development as productive scholars.

Adam Goodie, associate professor of psychology, was a recipient of a 2012 Creative Research Medal from UGA. Dr. Goodie studies pathological gambling and the cognitive processes, decision-making and personality characteristics associated with this dangerous condition that affects millions of Americans. Goodie discovered that the likelihood for one to gamble does not depend entirely on objective probabilities or how the individual perceives them, but on whether the individual perceives they can control the probabilities. Congratulations to Dr. Goodie on this outstanding achievement.

This year, for the first time in its long and illustrious history, the Psychology department held an undergraduate graduation ceremony on May 11, 2012. Two of them, actually, because although we reserved a large room, we needed two seatings to accommodate all of the graduating seniors who wished to take part. This ceremony was the only opportunity for our graduates to be honored individually for their accomplishment, as we had them marching with their names announced. A special thank you to the many people who made this event possible, especially Dr. Adam Goodie, Dr. Keith Campbell, Dr.

The Department of Psychology recently held its annual awards reception in the reading room of the Miller Learning Center. This reception was a nice opportunity for members of the Psychology Department and their colleagues to honor our students, staff, and faculty for all of their hard work and accomplishments during the 2011-2012 academic year.

The American Psychology Foundation joins the APA Science Directorate in congratulating Michael Amlung, M.S (Doctoral Candidate, Department of Psychology, The University of Georgia) as a recipient of the American Psychological Foundation's 2012 Ungerleider/Zimbardo Travel Scholarship. This highly-competitive scholarships awarded annually to seven graduate students nation-wide, based on quality of the student's current research and overall scholarly record. Mr.

Allison Howard and Kacy Welsh awarded a grant to develop a Language Across the Curriculum course

Allison Howard and Dr. Kacy Welsh have been awarded a grant to develop a Language Across the Curriculum course in PSYC 1101 (Elementary Psychology) with integrated Portuguese. This course will assist allow more people to access to learning about psychology. For more information on this program, please click this link.

The department is proud to announce that Dr. James MacKillop's research on smoking addiction was recently covered by the UGA website, UGA Today. For more information, please click here.

Recent Psychology Graduate Student Awards

The department is proud to announce several accomplishments and awards that have been given to graduate and undergradate students in Psychology in the past few months.