Awards / News

2022 Dissertation Award, Lana Ruvolo Grasser, PhD

2022 ISDP Dissertation Award goes to Lana Ruvolo Grasser, PhD (she/her/hers). Dr. Grasser recently obtained her PhD in Translational Neuroscience from Wayne State University. Under the mentorship of Drs. Arash Javanbakht and Tanja Jovanovic, her NIMH-funded dissertation project, “Biomarkers of Risk and Resilience to Trauma in Syrian Refugee Youth”, identified skin conductance response to trauma interview and fear potentiated startle as candidate biomarkers of trauma-related psychopathology in youth exposed to civilian war trauma and forced migration.

Awards / News

2022 David Kucharski Young Investigator Award, Ori Ossmy, PhD

The 2022 ISDP-David Kucharski Young Investigator Award goes to Dr. Ossmy who is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of Psychological Sciences and the Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development at Birkbeck, University of London. Research in his lab focuses on the development of behavioural and neural mechanisms underlying human problem solving. He is married to Anastasia and a father to Ely and Max.

Awards / News

2022 Sandra G. Wiener Student Investigator Award, Sofia (Sofi) Cardenas

Sofia (Sofi) Cardenas is a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow as well as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health Policy Research Scholar. She is pursuing a Ph.D. in Clinical Science with a specialization in Child and Family Studies at the University of Southern California. Sofi completed her BAs in Psychology and Art at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Awards / News

2022 Senior Investigator Award Winner, David J. Lewkowicz, PhD

ISDP 2022 Senior Investigator Award Winner – David J. Lewkowicz is currently Senior Research Scientist at Haskins Laboratories and Professor Adjunct in the Yale Child Study Center and the Yale Department of Psychology.

Dr. Lewkowicz obtained his BA at Brandeis University where he studied psychology and where he completed an honors thesis on the sex behavior of octopus with Dr. Jerome Wodinsky. He obtained his Ph.D. in Biopsychology at Hunter College of the City University of New York with Gerald Turkewitz where he conducted research on the development of multisensory perception in human infants. He then completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York with Dr. Susan Rose where he continued his studies of multisensory perception in human infants. Because of his abiding interest in the developmental process, Dr. Lewkowicz has always felt that ISDP was his primary intellectual home.

Awards / News

2021 David Kucharski Young Investigator Award, Maya Opendak, Ph.D.

Dr. Opendak is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Kennedy Krieger Institute. Research in the lab focuses on the developmental neurobiology of social behavior and the impact of experience, such as trauma, on infant circuits supporting complex behavior.

Awards / News

2021 David Kucharski Young Investigator Award, Kathryn Leigh Humphreys, Ph.D., Ed.M.

Dr. Kathryn Humphreys is an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Human Development at Peabody and an investigator in the Vanderbilt Kennedy Center. She is a member of the Vanderbilt Brain Institute, and holds a secondary faculty appointment in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, Dr. Humphreys received a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, completed a clinical predoctoral and postdoctoral fellowship in Infant Mental Health at the Tulane University School of Medicine, and completed a research postdoctoral followship at Stanford University.