The Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences is proud to announce two graduates who successfully completed the PhD program and defended their dissertations in the 2023-2024 academic year.

Psychology major Jason Davis '25, advised by Viola Stoermer, is the grand prize winner of this year's MAD Research Video contest. Katherine Jia '27, advised by Mark Thornton and Landry Bulls, is a runner up.

The 2023 Upper Valley Brain Bee winner, Harini Venkatesh took first place last month in the 2024 USA National Brain Bee Championship. Harini expressed her gratitude for the help of PBS graduate students Elizabeth Bien and Erica Townsend, and PBS Instructor Shawn Winter "for helping me learn material for the practical portion of the exam."

Second-year PBS graduate student Deepasri Prasad was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship for her winning project proposal, "Understanding the behavioral and neural effects of multisensory context on scene memory."

Associate Professor Luke Chang was awarded the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society 2024 Mid-Career Award to recognize his significant contributions to Social and Affective Neuroscience in terms of outstanding scholarship and service to the field.

Study identifies multiple emotion regulation systems, providing targets for therapy.

Research presents a unique case of a patient with prosopometamorphopsia.

The psychology major is interested in the human brain and translational research.

Graduate student Miriam Janssen's paper, "The Motivational Role of the Ventral Striatum and Amygdala in Learning From Gains and Losses," was awarded the 2023 D.G. Marquis Behavioral Neuroscience Award.

Senior Lecturer John Pfister recently invited renowned author and dowser, Tick Gaudreau, to visit his first-year seminar course, "Science, Pseudoscience, and Thinking Critically about Human Behavior."