2014 APA Convention Div. 28 Highlights

Div. 28 consistently offers excellent programming at the annual convention, and this year's meeting in Washington, D.C. (August 7-10, 2014), is no exception. As in years past, we intend to kick-off our programming with presentations by our division award winners and recently appointed APA fellows. Dr. Alice Young, winner of this year's Brady Schuster Award, will present a talk called "Drug Cues and Drug Tolerance." We will also hear from Dr. Rebecca Sripada, winner of this year's Outstanding Dissertation Award, and Dr. Cassandra Gipson, winner of this year's Young Psychopharmacologist Award. APA accepted five Div. 28 members into fellow status last summer, and two of them – Drs. Sharon L. Walsh and Brain L. Hitsman – will present during the Fellows Address.

From the awards talks to the outstanding symposia and workshops (nine sponsored or co-sponsored by Div. 28), this year's program highlights a broad range of topics, approaches and perspectives. For example, Dr. Matthew Johnson is chairing a symposium entitled “Cannabis, Prescription Drugs, and Legal Highs – Research on Drugs of Evolving Legal Status.” This is a nice complement to “Considering Cannabis? Potential Public Health Implications of Marijuana Legalization,” a symposium chaired by Drs. Krista Lisdahl and Alan Budney, offered as part of the "Controversies and Difficult Dialogues in Psychology" theme of the APA Collaborative Programming initiative. Dr. Cora Lee Wetherington of the National Institute on Drug Abuse will chair a symposium entitled “Cognitive and Affective Factors in Substance Use in Men and Women,” a nice complement to Dr. Ellen Walker's Presidential Address, entitled “Prescription Opioids: Roles of Efficacy, Pain States, and Sex in Reward-Related Behaviors.”

If the application of quantitative pharmacological techniques to the interpretation of behavioral dose-response data is your thing (and even if it's not), you are sure to learn a lot from Drs. Ellen Walker, Robert Raffa, James Woods, Sara Ward, and Jonathan Katz in their skills-building workshop entitled, “Making Pharmacology Accessible to Psychologists---Ronald J Tallarida, PhD.” And once again, NIDA intends to support travel awards for early career investigators to present their posters at the “Early Career Investigator Poster Session and Social Hour,” co-sponsored with Div. 50. So, from symposia on “Delay Discounting and Risky Behaviors in Crowd Sourced Special Populations” and “Community Approaches to Assessing and Intervening on University Student Drinking” to professional development activities on the “Evolving Role of Behavior in Science at the National Institute on Drug Abuse” and a “Grant Writing Workshop,” this year's program is a great overview of all that we do.

I look forward to seeing you in Washington, D.C.