Dear Psychology Colleagues,
Zhicheng Lin, a grad student in our Cognitive and Biological (CAB) program, has won a prestigious Early Researcher Award from APA. He is the recipient in the Basic Science category for 2008.
Our congratulations to Zhicheng for this splendid recognition.
--Gordon
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Award Winners Announced
by Amy Pitta
The APA Science Student Council (APASSC) established the Early Researcher Award in 2004 to recognize students who have demonstrated outstanding research ability early in their graduate careers. In 2008, the APASSC presented two $1,000 awards - one each for applied and basic science - to the following recipients:
Faith Brozovich received an Early Researcher Award in Applied Science for her paper entitled Post-Event Processing: Self-Evaluation of Performance in Social Anxiety. A third-year doctoral student at Temple University, Brozovich's research focuses on cognitive biases in anxiety disorders, specifically the role of post-event processing in maintaining social anxiety through memory and interpretation biases. As Brozovich explains, "socially anxious individuals play these interactions over in their heads in a maladaptive way, reconstructing them over time so that their memories for these events become more and more negative." Upon completion of her clinical graduate work, she would like to obtain a faculty position at a university and continue this line of research. She plans to use the award funds to travel to several conferences this year.
Zhicheng Lin, a second-year doctoral student at the University of Minnesota, received an Early Researcher Award for Basic Science. His paper, entitled Binding and Attentional Selection in Face Recognition, reflects his curiosity over how the brain allows us to interpret visual input. Lin describes his research as aiming to "blur the borders between vision, cognition, and emotion…to better understand how the brain enables us to make sense of sensory inputs and select behaviorally relevant information to guide adaptive decision making." Lin would like to use the award funds to help promote his research, including such activities as mailing preprints and giving talks. He plans to become a professor at a research university upon graduation.