Moving Forward

It’s a pleasure to begin a term as Chair of UW Psychology and to bring you this 2006 newsletter with highlights of some of the exciting things happening here.

The inaugural Allen Edwards Psychology Lecture series (see p. 10) will welcome the public to hear about cutting-edge work by nationally prominent faculty from UW Psychology and other institutions on topics of both social and scientific interest. These include Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, HIV prevention and treatment compliance, the increasingly political context of research funding, and the use of functional brain imaging to study social and genetic contributions to delinquency, drug, and alcohol use. This is the latest way in which the endowment left to UW Psychology by Professor Allen Edwards has enriched and fundamentally transformed our department’s intellectual climate.

The Hunt Graduate Fellowship Fund and Alcor Graduate Support Fund (see p. 9) are two other recent examples of strategic gifts that provide crucial graduate support not furnished by our state funding.

A point made by the features in this issue is that our educational, research, and community-service projects are truly interconnected. Our classes and academic programs equip students to go on to contribute to science and to community service here in Washington and the Puget Sound area. Our research activities contribute to the training of undergraduate and graduate students, provide direct community service, and bring in $7-8 million a year to the local economy.

Our department is truly the bridge that connects the social and biological approaches to the study of behavior here at UW. This is nowhere more evident than in our push into the emerging field of cognitive and affective neuroscience, which makes use of both behavioral and functional neural imaging techniques. We’re hiring new faculty and developing new facilities and partnerships with the goal of making UW one of the top centers in the country in this area.

We rely on your contributions, large and small, to help up accomplish these goals. See p. 8 to learn how easy it is to contribute to UW Psychology. I hope that you enjoy reading about some of our activities and accomplishments and the very special people who make them happen in this newsletter. Please visit our website to learn even more about us.

Steve Buck, Chair

January 2006