October 9, 2019
Roxane Cohen Silver, FABBS President-Elect, was awarded The Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Silver studies the acute and long-term reactions of both personal traumas and community-wide disasters such as the September 11 terrorist attacks, the 2010 Chilean earthquake, and Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. This award is a senior career award that honors a social or personality psychologist who has applied theoretical and/or empirical psychological discoveries and advances to the understanding and improvement of important practical problems across his or her career.
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation announced its 2019 class of MacArthur fellowships, often known as “genius grants”, in late September. Representing our sciences among the 26 honorees were Vanessa Ruta, a neuroscientist from Rockefeller University, and Joshua Tenenbaum, a cognitive scientist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Ruta’s work focuses on how the brain processes sensory information and generates behavioral responses, also distinguishing between innate and learned behaviors. Tenenbaum’s research combines computational models and behavioral experiments to determine just how it is that we humans can learn so much about our world — social rules, language, complex patterns – with relatively little input and so quickly.
FABBS congratulates these honorees and the impact of their work to improve our understanding of ourselves and society.
