The Psychology Department is pleased to welcome Dr. Albert Powers from Yale University Department of Psychiatry for a special guest lecture on Wednesday, January 30th at 3:30pm in Psychology Room 120. Dr. Powers is the Medical Director of Yale Psychosis Research Clinic and will giving a talk titled "Conditioned Hallucinations: Toward Development of Computational Markers for Early Diagnosis and Personalized Treatment." Welcome Dr. Powers!

Congratulations to Dr. Anne Shaffer who just received an R34 grant from NIMH! The project is a collaboration with Dr. Claire Aarnio-Peterson, a 2014 UGA clinical psychology graduate who is now at Cincinnati Children's Hospital and Medical Center. Dr. Shaffer and Dr. Aarnio-Peterson are piloting an enhancement of Family Based Therapy for adolescents with anorexia that targets family emotion communication. Congratulations Dr. Shaffer!

Dr. Allison Howard just received the Office of Sustainability Faculty mini-grant to support her teaching and enhance her classes with virtual reality using two Oculus Go. The Office of Sustainability gives these mini-grants with the objective of enhancing teaching of sustainability. Dr. Howard will be using two Oculus Go in her sections of Comparative and Physiological Psychology this semester. She will use the headsets to allow students to "visit" primatology field sites, glaciers, penguins in Antarctica, etc.

BBS Graduate student Michael Snell received a prestigious UX Research internship with Facebook. He will be working in Menlo Park, California for 12 weeks this summer. Congratulations Michael!

Dr. Jasmine Abrams, Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, presented her research on the Strong Black Woman Schema and its connection to depressive symptoms to students and faculty of the UGA Clinical Psychology program. We were so happy to have Dr. Abrams speak about her research and welcome her to campus!

Dr. Markus Junghöfer, senior scientist visiting from the University of Münster's Institute of Biomagnetism and Biosignalanalysis will be discussing his work on "Emotional Processing in Major Depression: vmPFC as a New Target for Transcranial Stimulation"

Congratulations to this cohort of second-year BBS students who presented talks on their first-year research projects! The talks were wide-ranging on subject matter, and excellently executed. 

(Top row L-R: Andrew Farkas, Rowena Xia, Rebekah Trotti, Will Schiavone; Bottom row L-R: Jaeseon Song, Kelsey Corallo, Libby Thomas, Sarah Lyle).

"Pioneer Visual Neuroscience: A Festschrift for Naomi Weisstein" was published this month and edited by faculty member Dr. James M. Brown, Dr. Weisstein's last graduate student at the University of Buffalo. This book honors Naomi Weisstein’s foreshortened span of work published from 1964 to 1992. Naomi Weisstein was a pioneer in the areas we now call visual neuroscience, visual cognition, and cognitive neuroscience. Her enthusiastic pursuit of the mind was infectious, inspiring many others to take up the challenge.

The UGA Psychology BBS program was well represented at the annual meeting of the "Society for Psychophysiological Research" in Quebec City, Canada (early October), as 4 students presented their research. Ask Elizabeth Edge, Andrew Farkas, Libby Thomas or Rebekah Trotti about their work next time you seen them! 

Congratulations to Dr. Katie Ehrlich and Dr. Greg Strauss who both received NARSAD Young Investigator Grants! The grants, awarded annually, support the work of early-career scientists with innovative ideas for groundbreaking neurobiological research seeking to identify causes, improve treatments and develop prevention strategies for psychiatric disorders.