The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences congratulates the class of 2019, which included over 100 psychology and neuroscience majors. At the department’s annual picnic, we recognized five students who graduated with honors in Psychology and eleven students who graduated with honors in Neuroscience. We also awarded several prizes to members of the graduating class.
2019 Undergraduate Prizes and Awards
Benjamin G. Benner 1969 Award for Excellence in...
Cara Van Uden (’19) has won this year's Neukom Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Research in Computational Science. Cara worked in Professor James Haxby’s laboratory and published a paper on her research last year in Frontiers in Neuroscience as first author. Cara is a double major in Cognitive Science and Computer Science and received High Honors for her senior thesis, advised by James Haxby (PBS), Yaroslav Halchenko (PBS), and Lorenzo Torresani (Computer Science). For...
[more]Assistant Professor Luke Chang has been awarded a 2019 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. The award from the Association for Psychological Science was established to recognize transformative contributions to psychological science by rising stars in the field. The award celebrates the many new and cutting edge ideas coming out of the most creative and promising investigators who embody the...
[more]The new PBS faculty members described their research to Dartmouth News for the new faculty spotlight.
Assistant Professor Katherine Nautiyal
I am interested in how the brain generates self-control. My research focuses on the role of serotonin in modulating the neural circuits that regulate impulsive behavior. My lab manipulates serotonin signaling in rodent models and measures the resulting...
[more]Armin Tavakkoli ’20 has been awarded a Senior Fellowship for his research with Professor David Bucci and Research Assistant Professor Travis Todd. This Senior Fellowship will allow Armin, a Psychology major, to spend his senior year on his innovative research working to identify the neural mechanisms that are responsible for fear reduction.
Armin is also a recipient of the...
[more]The 2018 Leaton Lecturer, Rebecca Burwell, visited PBS on Friday, November 16. Professor Burwell is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, with a secondary appointment in the Department of Neuroscience. Despite an early season snow storm, her lecture entitled "The Neural Bases of Spatial Context: Beyond the Hippocampus" was well attended. While she was in...
[more]Travis Todd, a Research Assistant Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences, has received a four-year K01 research grant through the National Institute of Mental Health. The research will utilize cutting edge neurophysiological methods to investigate how fear and fear reduction are encoded within the brain. The research is highly relevant to public health, since fear-related disorders are among the most prevalent forms of mental illness and cost billions of dollars to treat each year....
[more]October 03, 2018 by Amy Olson
Original article available on the Dartmouth News site.
Playing violent video games is associated with increases in physical aggression over time in children and teens, according to a Dartmouth analysis of 24 studies from around the world involving more than 17,000 participants.
The...
[more]Senior Lecturer John Pfister, longtime instructor in Psychological and Brain Sciences, has received the Dartmouth 2018 Dean of the Faculty Teaching Award.
From the Dartmouth News article by Hannah Silverstein:
Each year, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences recognizes exemplary members of the faculty for their contributions as scholars, teachers, and mentors. In 2018, 12...
[more]PBS Assistant Professor Kyle Smith has received a 5-year R01 research grant through the National Institute on Drug Abuse at the National Institutes of Health. The grant will fund studies related to brain circuit mechanisms for reward cue attraction. A core symptom in addiction is an excessive motivational reaction to environmental cues that have been associated with drug use. The proposed research will use state-of-the-art technologies to characterize brain mechanism by which such...
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