The Awards Committee received applications for a total of 7 awards. Three award recipients accepted their awards in person at the APA Conference 2023 in Washington DC in August. Congratulations to all winners!
Baltes Distinguished Research Achievement (DRA) Award
Winner: Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz, PhD, at University of Michigan
Patricia A. Reuter-Lorenz is the Michael I. Posner Collegiate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, at the University of Michigan. She received her MS and PhD from the University of Toronto, and postdoctoral training at Cornell Medical Center, NY and Dartmouth Medical School. She has published 140 peer-reviewed articles to date, in addition to numerous chapters, commentaries, and two edited books. Using behavioral and brain imaging methods, she investigates working memory, executive functions, and emotion-cognition interactions in adulthood and older age. Her seminal research identified age-related alterations in prefrontal recruitment and neurocognitive compensation in older adults. Her theoretical contributions also provide a framework for understanding neurocognitive effects of training interventions, as well as life span environmental, experiential and biological influences on aging cognition, decline, and brain plasticity (scaffolding). An elected Fellow of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, she received the Justine Sergent Prize for Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, outstanding mentor awards from APA-Division 20 and the University of Michigan. She served as co-director of the International Max Planck Research School on Life Span Development, governing board member of the Psychonomics Society, Editor-in-Chief of Aging, Neuropsychology & Cognition, among numerous other service roles. She is a co-founder of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society and has played a leadership role in this organization for over thirty years.
Division 20 Graduate Research Award
Winner: James W. Miller, MS, at Colorado State University
James Miller is a 4th year PhD student in the Applied Developmental Science PhD program at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado where he also works as a graduate research assistant in the Health Emotion and Aging Research Team (HEART Lab) under the supervision of his advisor Gloria Luong, PhD. Broadly, his research focuses on how different forms of stress may differentially affect people across adulthood with an emphasis on translating his research into prevention focused programming to help others navigate life’s challenges. After graduation, James hopes to pursue a career where he can apply the skills he has gained to improve healthy aging outcomes through applied research.
John Santos Distinguished Program Development in Clinical Gerontology Award
Winner: Erin Emery-Tiburcio, PhD, ABPP, at Rush University Medical Center
Emery-Tiburcio, PhD, ABPP is an Associate Professor of Geriatric & Rehabilitation Psychology and Geriatric Medicine at Rush University Medical Center, as well as Co-Director of the Rush Center for Excellence in Agingopens in new window, co-director of CATCH-ON, the HRSA-funded Geriatric Workforce Enhancement Programopens in new window based at Rush University Medical Center, and co-director of the E4 Centeropens in new window: Engage, Educate, and Empower for Equity, The Center of Excellence for Behavioral Health Disparities in Aging. She is past-Chair of the APA Committee on Aging, past-President of the Society for Clinical Geropsychology, and currently co-chairs the APA taskforce to revise the APA Guidelines for Working with Older Adults.
Mentorship Award in Aging
Winner: Sharda Umanath, PhD, at Claremont McKenna College
Umanath received her PhD in cognitive psychology in 2014 from Duke University and completed her postdoc in aging and development at Washington University in St. Louis through a National Institute on Aging T32 Postdoctoral Training Grant. She received promotion with tenure at her current institution, Claremont McKenna College in 2021. Her research focuses on how knowledge works in memory and explores related issues involving cognitive aging, autobiographical memory, collective memory, false memories, and education. She has over 40 published works (10 with undergraduate co-authors—a total of 13 different students) in journals like Perspectives on Psychological Science, Memory & Cognition, Psychological Review, and Psychology & Aging. She serves as an associate editor for Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and a consulting editor for two other journals. She was named an Association for Psychological Science Rising Star in 2018, received an Honorable Mention for the 2023 J. Don Read Early Career Award from the Society for Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (SARMAC), and recently won the 2023 Early Career Award from the Psychonomic Society. She has earned funding from the Association for Psychological Science, the James S. McDonnell Foundation, and the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program. She began serving as a mentor for the Division 20 Early Career Task Force Mentoring Program in 2023. In her time as a professor, she has mentored more than 50 undergraduates, formally as research assistants in her lab and informally, across 6 small liberal arts college institutions.
Doctoral Dissertation Award in the Psychology of Aging
Winner: Yee To Ng, PhD, at University of Michigan
Ng is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research and Michigan Medicine’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation. She earned her PhD in Human Development and Family Sciences with minors in Applied Statistical Modeling and Aging & Health from the University of Texas at Austin. Intrigued by problems at the intersection of human development, social psychology, and health sciences, Ng studies how close relationships influence health across adulthood and among different populations (e.g., older adults, different racial/ethnic groups, and people with disability). Her work utilizes mobile and wearable technologies to track individuals’ social interactions and behaviors, emotional well-being, and physiological functioning in real-life settings. Her interdisciplinary research has been published in top-tier journals, including The Gerontologist, The Journals of Gerontology, Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences. Her work was also recognized as Top paper at multiple national and international conferences. In addition, her pilot projects related to friendships in caregiving contexts have been funded by the Michigan Center on the Demography of Aging (MiCDA) and Dan Barry Research Program grant.
Springer Early Career Achievement Award in Research on Adult Development and Aging
Winner: Jeremy M. Hamm, PhD, at North Dakota State University
Jeremy Hamm, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at North Dakota State University. After earning his PhD at the University of Manitoba and completing an internship at the Institute for Psychogerontology at the University of Nuremberg, he completed two nationally-funded postdocs at the University of California, Irvine and Concordia University. His research examines motivational processes that underlie how people respond to stressful life experiences and transitions they encounter throughout adulthood and old age. Hamm’s work in this area has shed new light on how and under what circumstances core motivational beliefs, emotions, and strategies shape adaptive development during major life stressors. His studies were the first to show that responding to late life health threats using self-reliant health engagement strategies predicted reduced risk of death over 10 years, but only under circumstances in which older adults were also willing to seek help from others. Hamm’s research has had a broad influence across subfields of psychology relevant to adult development and aging in addressing critical developmental challenges across the entire lifespan and in multiple life domains (education, work, and health). His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Deutscher Academischer Austausch Dienst (German DAAD). Hamm was designated a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in 2022 for his early career research contributions.
The Walter G. McMillen Memorial Award for Parkinson’s Disease Research
Winner: Shraddha B. Kinger at Boston University
Shraddha Kinger is a third year Clinical Psychology doctoral student at Boston University (BU) with a clinical and research focus in neuropsychology. Her research interests include studying the impact of non-motor symptoms on quality of life in Parkinson’s disease, as well as identifying interventions to target psychiatric and cognitive symptoms. She is also interested in the neuropsychological assessment and rehabilitation of neurodegenerative conditions, with the goal of practicing as a clinical neuropsychologist in the future.