Thirty-two exceptional graduate students were selected as recipients of the 2025-26 Campus-Wide Teaching Assistant Awards, recognizing their strengths and commitment surrounding the craft of teaching. Two of them, LiChen Dong and Lauren Anthony, are graduate students in the Department of Psychology.
UW–Madison employs over 2,400 teaching assistants (TAs) across a wide range of disciplines. Their contributions to the classroom, lab, and field are essential to the university’s educational mission. To recognize the excellence of TAs across campus, the Graduate School, the College of Letters & Science, and the Morgridge Center sponsor these annual awards. Volunteer judges selected awardees for four categories: early excellence, advanced achievement, capstone teaching, and community-based learning. LiChen received the Advanced Achievement in Teaching Award which recognizes TAs with four or more semesters of teaching experience at UW–Madison who are not in the final year of a PhD. Lauren received the Capstone Teaching Award which recognizes dissertators at the end of their graduate program with an outstanding teaching record over the course of their UW–Madison tenure. Congratulations to both of these outstanding TAs!
LiChen Dong
LiChen is a graduate student in the Department of Psychology in the clinical psychology area. His research focuses on the nature and nurture of psychopathology as well as how they interact. He’s also interested in how broader social factors such as social determinants of health may shape the development of psychopathology. In his clinical training, LiChen works with neurodiverse children and adolescents with complex behavioral needs.
LiChen has been dedicated to teaching Design and Analysis of Psychological Experiments I & II, the cornerstone statistical training sequence for psychology graduate students. He has also taught for an undergraduate class on Adult Psychopathology.
“My greatest fulfillment in teaching comes from watching the students grow not only in their professional capacities but also in their self-efficacy,” LiChen said. “The courses I have taught are often considered hard or content-heavy, such that many students may feel uncertain and intimidated at the start. I really enjoyed using empathy and other skills I learned from my clinical training to make students feel heard, validate difficult feelings, address unhelpful beliefs, and develop plans to problem-solve when the students face challenges in learning.”
His approach of leveraging students’ values and strengths to individualize support for them has helped many students who felt they were “imposters” increase motivation to participate, learn successfully with scaffolds, feel rewarded from completing small tasks, and become more confident and better prepared overall. “It was greatly rewarding when the students told me that I ‘made stats less scary’ and that my classroom featured ‘a welcoming, vibrant environment’,” he said.
Lauren Anthony
Lauren is a graduate student in Psychology broadly interested in the cognitive mechanisms that support learning in complex domains, with an emphasis on mathematics. Her research examines how individuals understand and use mathematical representations, particularly how people perceive and coordinate multiple representational formats and how these processes support problem solving and the communication of mathematical ideas. She also investigates how perceptual abilities to detect patterns can be leveraged to support learning and transfer of mathematical relationships.
“Because higher-order learning often depends on sustained engagement with challenging material, another line of my work examines the factors that influence persistence in cognitively demanding tasks,” Lauren said. “Overall, I hope to generate insights that can inform the development of interventions that support both learning and persistence in mathematics.”
She has designed and taught a capstone course on the Psychology of Academic Learning, which explored many of the cognitive, motivational, and socio-cultural factors that influence classroom learning. She’s also taught Introduction to Psychology as the primary instructor both in person and online, and has TA’d for Introduction to Statistics and Introductory Psychology.
“It has been such a privilege to work with students at UW–Madison,” Lauren said. “It’s incredibly exciting to exchange ideas with students, learn about their unique perspectives and insights, and create new meaning together. It has also been deeply rewarding to watch how much students grow over the course of a semester, not only in their ability to understand and engage with complex ideas, but also in the investment and pride they take in their own learning.”