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Professional Association Honors Psychology Department With Service Award
12/22/2006
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
The Davidson College Department of Psychology has received the American Psychological Association’s inaugural Departmental Award for the Culture of Service in the Psychological Sciences, presented at APA ceremonies recently in Washington, D.C.
Davidson’s strong psychology faculty is a good fit for the new award’s undergraduate category, said the college’s Nancy and Erwin Maddrey Professor and Chair of Psychology, Ruth Ault. She traveled to Washington to accept the award and $5,000 on behalf of her colleagues.
“The award symbolizes the value that the APA places on faculty who are leaders in a number of academic, research, and other professional areas. We have a strong, dynamic balance of that kind of leadership in our department,” Ault said.
“The Department of Psychology at Davidson College is a dedicated group of scholars who give back to their professional organizations and who effectively model service to their colleagues and generations of undergraduates,” the award says in part. To visit the Department of Psychology home page, click here.
A brief scan of highlights from Davidson’s application for the Culture of Service award provides a “who’s who” of the professionally diverse nine-member department, as well as some detail of the depth and breadth of expertise that each brings to meeting the criteria for the award: serving on boards, editing journals, reviewing grant proposals, mentoring students and colleagues, promoting the value of psychology to the public, and advocating for appropriate policy.
Wayne M. and Carolyn A. Watson Professor Ed Palmer is a charter member of the editorial board of Media Psychology and is quoted regularly in reports about the effects of televisual media on children. Recent interviews included The New York Times and The Washington Post, and National Public Radio. Professor Cole Barton’s research on behalf of families of missing children has earned national and regional awards from law-enforcement groups and others.
R. Stuart Dickson Professor of Psychology Julio Ramirez is founder of Davidson’s Neuroscience at Davidson concentration. Ramirez is founding senior editor of the Journal of Undergraduate Neuroscience, and has served on award panels and in many other capacities with the National Institute for Mental Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Associate Professor Mark Smith, also a neuroscientist, has met with congressmen on policy questions, and is a grant reviewer with the National Institutes of Health. He’s been an invited speaker on drug abuse at a research science seminar at Discovery Place museum in Charlotte.
Smith and Assistant Professor Scott Tonidandel this year are co-chairing Davidson’s Institutional Review Board, which reviews all research involving human subjects. Tonidandel has been an invited speaker on statistics at grand rounds at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, and has served on the history committee of the Society of Industrial and Organizational Psychology.
Others in the department also bring this characteristic depth of scientific expertise to bear in the broader landscape of professional and community service, as well as to scientific publications in their fields of study.
Professor John Kello chaired the N.C. Industrial and Organizational Psychologists, and his column in Industrial Safety and Hygiene News reaches a national readership of 70,000. Associate Professor Kristi Multhaup is a consulting editor of the Journal of General Psychology and her site-based work with students and senior citizens on aging, mnemonics, and memoirs has been featured on NPR.
Associate Professor of Psychology and Humanities Greta Munger co-writes Cognitive Daily, a site working to popularize scientific psychology, and has worked with the college’s music department and local schools on the “Mozart effect” and the psychological significance of color in Monet.
Ault herself is executive editor of the Journal of Genetic Psychology, director of APA’s Office of Teaching Resources in Psychology (e.g., mentoring services), a longtime program organizer for a variety of professional groups, and has worked closely with the Davidson–Cornelius Daycare Center in initiating and evaluating research participation requests.
The award included a cash award, and its dispensation by the department brings the story full circle to its culture of service.
“The department has decided to put the money into the college endowment and use the interest to fund awards for service leadership that shows a particularly strong application of psychology,” Ault said. “We have not yet decided whether to restrict the award to current students or reach back into the alumni pool as well, but we thought it fitting to continue the idea of a ‘culture of service in the psychological sciences’ by highlighting students who have embodied the same values.”
Davidson is a highly selective independent liberal arts college for 1,700 students. Since its establishment in 1837 by Presbyterians, the college has graduated 23 Rhodes Scholars and is consistently ranked in the top ten liberal arts colleges in the country by U.S. News and World Report magazine.
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