In this Issue:

This has been a year of incredible growth for our department, and we’re looking forward to even more growth in the coming year! Last year we welcomed Dr. Federica Bulgarelli to our department. Dr. Bulgarelli’s research focuses on how language develops in early childhood, and her recent work has examined language development during the COVID-19 pandemic. You can read more about this interesting research – and the work of several other Psychology faculty members – in this newsletter. We also are in the midst of a search for three new faculty members. These hires are part of a Disciplinary Excellence investment in the Psychology Department by UB’s Provost. These three faculty will join the department and help to build expertise in studying disparities in mental health and well-being across the lifespan.

In the classroom, through experiential learning opportunities such as working in research labs and through involvement in clubs, activities, and independent Honors projects, our more than 1500 undergraduate Psychology majors are gaining important experience in the field. UB’s “Model Chapter” of the International Psychology Honor Society, Psi Chi, is another of the many ways that our undergraduates get and stay connected with the field. This year, Psi Chi has continued to be busy, with 64 new inductees and activities that have included a scavenger hunt, yoga night, and Western NY’s only undergraduate psychology research conference, organized by our own Dr. Joyce Lacy. This year, we are delighted to have expanded our undergraduate teaching capacity with an incredible four new teaching faculty, Drs. Dowling, James, Perazio, and Wersinger. Each of these faculty comes with a depth of teaching experience, unique expertise, and a lot of energy! In this newsletter, you can read more about these new faculty and some of the exciting plans that they have for our students.

Our department’s Masters and Doctoral students are crucial to the Department’s mission, and we are honored to mentor them and support their professional development. These graduate students are active in research in faculty labs, publishing papers, presenting at conferences, and winning awards.  Please read more in this newsletter about some of our graduate students’ outstanding achievements this past year.  

Also, this newsletter is more about the Psychology Department’s participation in UB’s VITAL scholar program. This program brings early career faculty from historically underrepresented backgrounds to UB’s campus to share their research and forge connections for the future. In October, the Psychology Department was selected to host three scholars, who visited us for nearly a week, meeting with faculty, touring the city, and discussing research and career plans.

I hope that you enjoy reading more about our department’s activities and our plans for 2024. I thank you for your past generous donations.  Your support allows us to expand and move forward in new and meaningful ways. We are grateful for the opportunity to build our department with your help.  

In closing, I wish you a very happy and healthy holiday season. We look forward to connecting with you more in the New Year.

Best,
Jen Read

They also play a critical role in the administration of the undergraduate program, including directing programs, chairing departmental committees, coordinating assessments, and promoting high-quality teaching practices. Many of our Clinical/Teaching faculty conduct research, generate new knowledge about teaching or investigate scientific questions with psychology students as co-authors.

We welcomed four new Clinical/Teaching Faculty members to our department at the start of the fall semester. Carey Dowling will teach our large Clinical Psychology classes, including Psychopathology and Developmental Psychology, as well as Psychological Statistics. Kimberly James will teach UB Seminar classes to new UB students, including a course she developed intriguingly called Brains! The Neuroscience of Zombies. Christina Perazio will split her time between UB Seminar courses and large Cognitive Psychology classes, including Sensory Processes and Perception. Scott Wersinger will be splitting his time between UB Seminar courses and Biopsychology. 

Two of these new instructors – Kimberly James and Scott Wersinger – are already collaborating to provide 199 students with some exciting experiential learning. Students will have the opportunity to take guided tours of UB’s Brain Museum and participate in small neuroanatomy workshops (dissecting sheep brains). Kim and Scott hope this will springboard into a mini-brain fair where 199 students will research a brain region and present posters to other 199 students.

The Meyer lab used rats to identify genes involved in cocaine addiction and relapse. They found that changing the activity of a gene involved in regulating the connection between brain cells can reduce cocaine intake and craving.

The Park Lab is examining people’s theories about how happiness works. People who think happiness is fleeting (so you should live in the moment) are psychologically better off than people who think of happiness as something you work at.

Research from the Pfordresher lab suggests music lessons can help! People with musical training — whether instrumental or vocal — are better at imitating pitch, which can help them learn tonal languages like Mandarin that rely on inflection to communicate meaning.

The Mercado lab investigates whales' cognitive control of song production and their ability to improvise vocally. So far, several whales have been able to precisely sequence song sounds from simple to complex, and they even seem to do this in coordination with singing partners. This shows that whales, like young children, can flexibly choose what to sing when!

The Hawk lab is currently advocating for more research to examine the benefits/costs of delivering clinical interventions to people in their homes. They hope such research can reveal whether at home intervention helps or hurts traditionally underrepresented groups (e.g., racial and ethnic minoritized groups, residents of rural areas).

Research from the Ashare lab is investigating structural factors, like income, race and neighborhood, that can make it more difficult for people to get access to the types of cannabis products that can best manage cancer-related symptoms.

As part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen department inclusiveness and reach, we hosted 3 VITAL scholars for a week in October 2023. The Visiting Future Faculty (VITAL) program is the Office of Inclusive Excellence initiative. This program was developed to support the career development of young scholars from historically underrepresented backgrounds. While on campus, our visiting scholars participated in academic activities, professional development sessions, received mentorship, and toured UB and the city of Buffalo. They also met with students, faculty, and staff in our department and gave talks on their research. Olutosin (Tosin) Adesogan (University of Georgia) discussed factors associated with risk and resilience in rural Black communities; Adelis Cruz (Texas A&M University) discussed the neurobiological mechanisms of addiction-related processes using rodent models; Arturia Melson-Silimon (University of Georgia) discussed experiences of discrimination and prejudice among employees with marginalized identities. 

The department also funds an annual Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Grant Program. These grants support undergraduate and graduate students on projects and activities that enhance inclusiveness in the field of psychological science. For the 2022-2023, we were able to fund six students. This included three research projects and assistance to three students to present at academic conferences. If you would like to support this program, we would welcome your donation.

The opioid overdose crisis is no longer in the headlines, but that doesn’t mean it has gone away. In fact it’s getting worse, with more deaths every year.  The nature of the crisis is also shifting, as deaths are now rising fastest among minority communities.  We are in dire need of solutions to the crisis that address what scholars call “the social determinants of health,” i.e., the social stratifications and inequalities put some communities at higher health risks than others, and that transform individual risks into public health crises.

To address this need, a group of faculty experts in the College of Arts and Sciences, Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, Public Health, Nursing, Law, Social Work, and Education to develop a new MA program called “Drugs, Health and Society.”  Most academic work in the addictions space is housed in the sciences—in biomedicine, or psychology, or treatment.  Our new program is unique in that it is truly multidisciplinary. The goal is to train the next generation of experts in all aspects of drugs and addiction as a scientific, social and political problem, so that we can address the overall social crisis as well as the individuals harmed by it.