Graduate Student Dorian Lamis Publishes Book

Congratulations to Clinical-Community PhD Student Dorian Lamis, who has published an edited volume on the important topic of “Understanding and Preventing College Student Suicide”. The book was published in August by Charles C Thomas Pub Ltd. It is quite an accomplishment for a student to serve as the lead author on a book while still in graduate school. This achievement is representative of the activities of the outstanding cohort of graduate students in the Department of Psychology.

Prof John Richards Receives Prestigious NIH MERIT Award Renewal

John Richards, PhD, Carolina Distinguished Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of South Carolina, has been awarded a second five years of funding for an NIH MERIT Award. The title of the award, funded through the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at NIH, is Development of Sustained Attention in Infants. Dr. Richards has been continuously funded by NIH for the past 25 years. The 5-year renewal will increase that record to an impressive 30 years of continuous NIH funding.

The research project examines the patterns of attention found in normal children, relates those attention patterns to physiological processes, examines potential brain areas that may be involved in those attention patterns, and may provide a model preparation for the study of children with irregular patterns of attention.

The overall objective of the MERIT Award program is to provide productive investigators with a history of exceptional talent, imagination, and with a record of preeminent scientific achievements the opportunity to continue making fundamental contributions of lasting scientific value.

MERIT Awards provide long-term, stable support to investigators whose research competence and productivity are likely to continue in the future and are intended to foster their continued creativity and lessen the administrative burdens associated with the preparation and submission of research grant applications.

MERIT awards are given in recognition of exemplary research programs that have been continuously NIH supported for at least three cycles of funding, and for which two concurrent competitive renewals receive a top score in their study section, and for which no revisions or amendments were required.

An investigator can only receive one in a lifetime, and only about 5 percent of NIH-funded investigators receive a MERIT award.

Dr. Bret Kloos Wins Fulbright Fellowship

Dr. Bret Kloos, an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology, has won a prestigious Fulbright Fellowship to conduct collaborative research in Portugal.

The Fulbright Award focuses on promoting community integration, adaptive functioning, and recovery for persons diagnosed with serious mental illness (SMI) in Lisbon, Portugal. Kloos will be working with colleagues at the Instituto Superior Psicologia Aplicada – Insituto Universitario Lisboa. The largest mental health hospital in Lisbon closed in 2011. In Portugal as in the U.S., there is increasing need to better understand how to support the growing number of persons diagnosed with serious mental illness living in community settings (e.g., apartments) rather than large institutions. The award will allow Kloos to undertake an intensive research collaboration with ISPA-IU researchers on psychiatric services and polices and teach cutting edge research methodologies in this area. His research collaborators in Lisbon recently received a large research grant that will develop community-engaged, participatory methodologies for investigating functioning in community settings. A complementary purpose of the Fulbright award is to help build the capacity of Portuguese scholars and mental health service professionals to develop, implement, and evaluate evidence based practices that best support persons with serious mental illness living in community settings.

Mind and Brain Colloquium Series

Last October I posted a quote from Nobel Laureate Dr. Eric Kandel– “Cognitive Neuroscience–With its concern about perception, action, memory, language and selective attention—will increasingly come to represent the central focus of all Neurosciences in the 21st century.” At that time I noted that the Psychology Department had initiated a colloquium series highlighting the relationship between mind and brain.

This year I’m excited to report that the department is continuing this series. We have already had two visitors to the department in August who presented stimulating discussions of their research.

Early in August, Dr. Philippe Schyns, Head of the School of Psychology and Director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at the University of Glasgow, gave a presentation titled Information Processing States and Their Transitions Inferred from Brain Activity.

Later in the month, Dr. Gina Kuperberg from Tufts University and Massachusetts General Hospital, presented her research directed toward the question What Can ERPs (and fMRI) Tell Us about Language Comprehension.

And there’s more to come. We’re looking forward to several additional talks over the coming months (stay tuned here for more information), including an upcoming talk by Dr. Joel Nigg from the Oregon Health and Science University. Dr. Nigg is a world-leading expert on ADHD. His research combines a variety of approaches to understanding this important problem, including behavioral studies, neuroimaging, and molecular genetics.

What an exciting way to kick off the new academic year in the department!

Inaugural MUSC/USC Imaging Retreat held in July

Uniting the unique academic and clinical communities of the University of South Carolina and the Medical University of South Carolina has been a key initiative at Capitol Hill in Columbia for a decade. This initiative was backed by funding from the State, included the creation of Centers of Economic Excellence (CoEE) aimed at nurturing the mutual growth of biomedical imaging research at both institutions, including neuroimaging at the McCausland Center for Brain Imaging at USC.

On July 15, 2011, MUSC hosted the Inaugural MUSC-USC Imaging retreat at Santee State Park, which is situated exactly half way between the universities. The retreat was a tremendous success. Over 40 people attended, with approximately half coming from each of the two universities. The CoEE endowed chairs (now referred to as SmartState chairs) from both Medical University of South Carolina (Dr. Joseph Helpern) and University of South Carolina (Dr. Christopher Rorden from the Department of Psychology at USC) were in attendance as well as a strong cohort of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, staff, graduate and undergraduate students. Many of the participants were members of the Psychology Department.

This is a milestone for both the SmartState system, as well as MUSC and USC.

The Psychology of Video Games

The Free Times has published an article featuring the Psychology Department’s summer course on the Psychology of Video Games. The course is offered by Dr. Adam Hutcheson, an instructor in the department, and focuses on serious research related to issues such as gaming’s positive and negative effects on memory, attention span, spatial cognition, motivation, aggression, socialization, and stress relief.

Professors Sandra Kelly and Dawn Wilson win the 2011 Psychology Graduate Student Association Teaching Award

The Psychology Graduate Student Association has reinstated the PGSA Departmental Teaching Award for faculty members, which has not been given since 2003. The recipients of the award for 2011 are Professor Dawn Wilson and Professor Sandra Kelly.

In her announcement, Julia Englund, President of the PGSA, noted that the awardees “excel both in mentoring and in classroom teaching”.

A plaque displaying the names of past winners will be engraved with the two new names and displayed in the main building entrance of Barnwell College.