2007-08 Guilford Winners' Biographies
The chair of the Psi Chi/J.P. Guilford Undergraduate Research Awards Committee, Christopher Koch, PhD, has announced the winners of the competition. Psi Chi congratulates these 2007-08 winners of the Guilford Awards and wishes them continued success. Cash awards were as follows: $1,000 for first place, $650 for second place, and $350 for third place. We encourage all Psi Chi members to begin now to prepare papers to submit for the 2008-09 research competition
Read abstracts of these award winning papers here.
Katy Orchowski is a junior at Allegheny College in Meadville, PA. She is a neuroscience and psychology double major, as well as a French minor. Her research interest began as a sophomore when she was a teaching assistant in the Physiological Psychology Laboratory. Since then, she has completed three research projects under the supervision of her research advisor Dr. Rodney Clark. Her research interest focuses on pharmacology, namely in the area of drug addiction. Ms. Orchowski’s most recent project compares the discriminative stimulus effects of caffeine and cocaine through several dopamine and adenosine antagonists. After graduating from Allegheny, she plans to obtain a PhD in neuroscience and pursue a career in pharmaceutical research.
Mindy Krischer graduated summa cum laude from Washington University in St. Louis with a double major in psychology and economics and a minor in applied statistics. At Washington University, she was a research assistant in the Social Behavior Lab run by Dr. Michael Strube. She has also worked as a research assistant at the University of South Florida College of Medicine. The current project comes from Ms. Krischer’s honors thesis in psychology, advised by Dr. Strube. She also received the John A. Stern Undergraduate Research Award from Washington University’s Psychology Department. The combination of her academic focus, as well as her experiences studying development economics at the London School of Economics and volunteering in Northeastern Thailand, have led to interests in culture, personality, adaptive performance, quantitative methods, and decision-making. She is currently pursuing a PhD in I/O psychology at the University of Houston.
Bonnie Nelson is a 2008 summa cum laude graduate of Pacific Lutheran University (PLU) in Tacoma, WA. She participated in the psychology department as vice-president of the Psi Chi chapter. She also worked as a teaching assistant in a research methods course and as a research assistant investigating rapport under the direction of Jon Grahe. She presented research at the WPA and the MPA Conventions. She was selected as a recipient of a 2008 WPA Student Scholarship Award as well as the 2007-08 PLU Severtson/Forest Foundation Student and Faculty Research Fellowship. She is currently serving a year as an AmeriCorps NCCC (National Civilian Community Corps) team leader in Colorado. She plans to attend graduate school for educational psychology.