The Department of Psychology is pleased to announce the recipients of the Fall 2020 undergraduate student awards.
The Arlene R. Davenport Award recognizes psychology students who have demonstrated a career interest in psychological research. This year’s recipients are Meredith Bone, Olivia Moens, and Zachary Demko.
Though still open to many paths, Meredith shares that she envisions a career in which she will work one-on-one with people and be able to help “in a more direct manner, likely a therapist of clinical psychologist.” Olivia hopes to receive her EdS in school psychology and “pursue research projects concerning effective assessment of young children, especially surrounding diversity.” Zachary hopes to work for the National Institutes of Health researching child psychopathology and earn a PhD in clinical psychology.
The Undergraduate Thesis Award, created by Dr. Joyce Rosevear who received her PhD from UW–Madison, supports research/thesis projects supervised by a Psychology Faculty mentor or to cover travel expenses to present research at a professional conference. This year’s recipients are Noah Phillips, Yuzhe Gu, and Fiona Lee.
Noah’s thesis project recruits top-level eSports competitors from around the world to complete a battery of cognitive tests, assessing how various measures of cognitive functioning correlate with objective skill in gaming. Yuzhe’s thesis project concerns language prediction in second language. He wants to “test whether Chinese-English bilinguals could use English articles to predict what’s coming next.” Fiona’s thesis project examines the perceived space of cognitive psychology tasks by asking cognitive psychology researchers to indicate which cognitive psychology tasks they think are similar to one another. From this data, she expects “to find unnoticed factors that researchers use to categorize cognitive tasks, such as complexity level and content of task, and reveal underlying relationships among cognitive domains.”
Congratulations to all of these outstanding scholars!