Department News

Flexner Award for Graduate Student Xuexin Wei

Xuexin Wei, co-advised by Prof. Vijay Balasubramanian and Prof. Alan Stocker of Psychology, has won the Louis B. Flexner Award for Outstanding Thesis Work in the Neurosciences. Students in any graduate group at Penn who did their Ph.D. on a neuroscience related topic in any lab across the University are eligible for the Flexner Award, sponsored by the Mahoney Institute for Neurosciences.

Xuesin is currently a postdoc fellow for Prof. Stocker.

Dorothy Cheney is elected to the National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences announced today the election of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates from 15 countries in recognition of their distinguished and continuing achievements in original research.

Those elected today bring the total number of active members to 2,250 and the total number of foreign associates to 452. Foreign associates are nonvoting members of the Academy, with citizenship outside the United States

Ayelet Ruscio is the 2015 recipient of the Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching and Geoff Goodwin is the 2015 recipient of the Dean’s Award for Mentorship of Undergraduate Research

Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching: The Ira H. Abrams Memorial Award for Distinguished Teaching for Faculty in the School of Arts and Sciences seeks to recognize teaching that is intellectually rigorous and exceptionally coherent and that leads to an informed understanding of a discipline. Recipients of the Ira Abrams Memorial Award are expected to embody high standards of integrity and fairness, to have a strong commitment to learning, and to be open to new ideas.

David Brainard received Prevent Blindness Stein Innovation Award

Penn Medicine’s department of ophthalmology has been awarded a $115,000 grant from Research to Prevent Blindness (RPB) to support research into the causes, treatment and prevention of blinding diseases. In addition, David Brainard, the RRL Professor of Psychology and director of the Vision Research Center and the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania, was awarded a $300,000 Research to Prevent Blindness Stein Innovation Award.

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Rob DeRubeis featured in Nature

Anna's life began to unravel in 2005 when her husband of 30 years announced that he had fallen in love with another woman. “It had never even occurred to me that my marriage could ever end,” recalls Anna, a retired lawyer then living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. “It was pretty shocking.”

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Marty Seligman has been awarded the Inaugural TANG Prize for Achievements in Psychology

The TANG Prize for Achievements in Psychology honors a living internationally-recognized scholar in Psychology or a closely-related field who have shown creativity, and rigor in their approach and whose record of achievement has left an indelible mark on the field. The TANG Foundation is a private institution established by Dr. Fay Tang in 2006, headquartered in Toronto, Canada. The objective of the TANG foundation is to raise awareness of the importance of psychological health in the world.