Former Award Winners

 

2012 Psychonomic Society Award Winner

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David A. Gallo, PhD
University of Chicago

David Gallo researches the basic neurocognitive processes of human memory, how we actively — and sometimes inaccurately — reconstruct the past, and how healthy aging and Alzheimer’s disease affect these processes. Gallo’s highly acclaimed book, Associative Illusions of Memory, not only has become an important reference to those in the field of memory, but it is relevant and accessible to the public at large.

Gallo joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 2005. He is the director of the Memory Research Laboratory at the University of Chicago. Gallo received his Ph.D. from Washington University in St. Louis in 2002 and served as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University until 2005.

2012 Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Award Winner

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Ayse P. Gurses, PhD
Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Ayse P. Gurses’ research focuses on improving patient safety in the cardiac operating room, transitions of care/ handoffs, care coordination, compliance of providers with evidence-based guidelines, and nursing working conditions. She has given more than 35 national and international talks on human factors engineering to diverse audiences including schools of engineering, information systems, business, medicine, nursing, public health, community hospitals, and state-level patient safety organizations. Gurses continues to lead the efforts in developing a workshop series on human factors in health care.

In addition, Gurses has extensive experience working in interdisciplinary research environments and collaborating with clinicians on human-factors related projects. Her work has been funded by the Agency for Health Care Research and Quality, National Patient Safety Foundation, National Science Foundation, Society of Cardiac Anesthesiologists, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Gurses is an assistant professor in the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She received her PhD in Industrial Engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2005 and completed her postdoctoral training at the University of Maryland-Baltimore in 2006.

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2012 Society for Computers in Psychology Award Winner

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Michael N. Jones, PhD
Indiana University, Bloomington

Michael Jones’ research focuses on language learning, comprehension, and knowledge representation in humans and machines. Jones combines computational and experimental techniques to examine large-scale statistical structure of certain environments with the goal of understanding how this structure could be learned and represented with the mathematical capabilities of human learning and memory. Jones also studies associative and recognition memory, categorization, decision-making, and the role of attention in reading and perception. He is particularly interested in the temporal dynamics of learning in all these domains, and how to model the time course of knowledge acquisition. His secondary interests involve the application of these models to practical problems in text mining, intelligent search algorithms, and automated comprehension and scoring algorithms.

The National Science Foundation recently awarded Jones a CAREER grant to investigate computational mechanisms for integrating linguistic and perceptual information in semantic representation. This project includes a very large scale “Semantic Pictionary” crowdsourcing project that includes several online games aimed at collecting massive amounts of perceptual data describing tens of thousands of words and explores mechanisms humans use to integrate the perceptual and linguistic information into a unified and embodied semantic representation.

Jones is an assistant professor of psychology at Indiana University, Bloomington. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Queen’s University in 2005 after which he spent two years as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado.

2012 Society for Behavioral Neuroendocrinology Award Winner

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Alexander (Sasha) Kauffman, PhD
University of California at San Diego

Alexander Kauffman is interested in reproductive neuroendocrinology; that is, how the brain controls reproduction. With this in mind, he studies how neuropeptides in specific brain regions stimulate or inhibit reproductive control centers in the forebrain, and how these processes affect an animal’s reproductive physiology and fertility. Kauffman is also interested in how neural regulatory circuits are affected by developmental factors, such as hormones and neural signals, and environmental factors, such as stress, both in adulthood and during puberty and sexual differentiation. Kauffman’s long-term goal is to apply what he and his collaborators learn about the neuroendocrine control of reproduction to improving and advancing medical and therapeutic treatments of human infertility, precocious or delayed puberty, and other reproductive disorders.

Kauffman is an assistant professor in the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Diego. He received his Ph.D. in Integrative Biology from the University of California in 2002, and completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, and a senior post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Washington, Seattle.

2012 Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology Award Winner

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Mo Wang, PhD
University of Florida

Mo Wang’s research interests include the areas of retirement, aging, and older workers; occupational health through understanding stress and coping; expatriate management; and quantitative methods.
Wang has been interviewed by various broadcast media outlets, including NPR, ABC, and the BBC, concerning his findings on post-retirement work activities and well being. Likewise, print media, such as the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Science Daily, and O-The Oprah Magazine, have spoken with him about his work on bridge employment and retirement.

Wang is an associate professor at the Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He received his Ph.D. in industrial-organizational psychology and developmental psychology from Bowling Green State University in 2005.

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