Alcohol education programs that focus on so-called “at-risk youth” are missing half their audience. A new study led by psychologist Candice Odgers shows that, like their at-risk peers, teens with no family history of substance abuse or behavioral problems are more likely to fail in school and develop addictions and sexually transmitted diseases if they experiment with alcohol before their 15th birthday.
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Chuansheng Chen has been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation for his work entitled: Collaborative Research: Learning to Read a Second Language: Neural Basis and Individual Variations.
Larry Jamner has been awarded funding from Yale University for his work entitled: T-Wave Alternans in Daily Life.
Psychology and Social Behavior welcomes Angela Lukowski. Angela received her Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology with a formal minor in Neuroscience from the University of Minnesota in January 2007. The goal of her research is to establish relations among neurodevelopment, memory, and executive function in infants and children undergoing normative developmental trajectories as well as in those with neurodevelopmental insults known to affect the hippocampus and dopamine system.
Elizabeth Loftus, Distinguished Professor of Social Ecology, will deliver the 2009 John P. McGovern Award Lecture in the Behavioral Sciences at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in February. The lecture honors prominent behavioral scientists from around the world. Past recipients include Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman. Loftus studies the malleability of human memory and applies her research to the legal field.
Jodi Quas has been selected as the American Psychological Foundation's 2008 Robert I Franz Memorial Award winner. This award is intended to recognize and encourage promising young investigators in psychology.
Kitty Calavita and Dan Stokols have been named UCI Chancellor's Professors. The title recognizes scholars who have demonstrated unusual academic merit and whose continued promise for scholarly achievement makes them of exceptional value to the university.
Dan Stokols, Chancellor's Professor of Social Ecology, co-edited a special issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine on the Science of Team Science. The issue is aimed at understanding and enhancing the results of collaborative research and training programs. Complex problems like global warming, AIDS, cancer, food security and terrorism require greater collaboration among scientists trained in different fields.
In August, Bill Thompson gave the keynote address Painting the Target around the Arrow: Misleading DNA Statistic, at the International Conference on Forensic Inference and Statistics in Lausanne, Switzerland.