The Psychology Department reception for Big Bash was held on Saturday, in Hays Hall. We had a great time, and enjoyed catching up with alums who we’ve had as students, and meeting alums who graduated before many of the current department members arrived at Wabash.
Photos from the reception (courtesy of Steve Charles) are posted here. If you made it to Big Bash, we hope that you had a chance to catch up on the recent events at Wabash and in the Psychology Department (a post on our Fall newsletter is available here). We plan to send out another departmental newsletter in the fall, but for now, we wanted to put out a short update to follow up on our Big Bash reception.
Highlights from 2013-14:
- Twenty-five senior psychology majors graduated this year. Each senior completed a year-long capstone research project, which he presented at the Butler Undergraduate Research Conference, and at our Psychology Research Symposium.
- Dr. Olofson received tenure, and was named the McClain-McTurner-Arnold Research Fellow
- Dr. Bost was promoted to full professor. Dr. Bost will also be serving as the College’s Institutional Research Officer for the next several years.
- Dr. Schmitzer-Torbert was named Daniel F. Evans Associate Professor in the Social Sciences.
- Dr. Rush joined the department in the fall, serving as Dr. Bost’s replacement during sabbatical and next year while Dr. Bost serves as our IR officer. Dr. Rush came to Wabash from University of California, Riverside, and last year he taught Psychology and Law, Cognitive Psychology, Literature Review and Introduction to Psychology. Dr. Rush’s work focuses on memory and eyewitness testimony, and he is working with four Wabash students this summer in research.
- Dr. Aubele-Futch accepted a tenure-track offer to join the faculty at St. Mary’s University. We will certainly miss her here, but wish her the best in her new position! Over the past two years, Dr. Aubele-Futch has taught in our neuroscience courses, Introduction to Psychology, Literature Review and Hormones and Behavior as a sabbatical replacement. Last summer, she worked with Brad Wise ’14 on a study of the effects of nitric oxide on sexual behavior in male rats, which Dr. Aubele-Futch and Brad will be presenting as the Society for Neuroscience Meeting in Washington, D.C., this fall.
- Profs. Preston Bost, Robert Horton and Ryan Rush had research articles published in 2013, two of which included Wabash students as co-authors.
- Another research article appeared in print this spring, describing work that Dr. Olofson conducted with three Wabash students in their senior capstone project on autism.
- And Dr. Gunther had two articles come out in print this spring, in the Journal of the Optical Society of America A (you can find abstracts for these articles here, and here).
- Connor O’Rear ’14 was named the Distinguished Senior in Psychology, and Nathan Bryant ’14 received the Capstone award.
- Andy Walsh ’14 and minor Ryan Cloyd ’14 delivered an excellent pair of speeches at Commencement.
- Profs. Gunther, Aubele-Futch and Schmitzer-Torbert brought the 5th annual mGluRs undergraduate research conference to Wabash in the fall.
- The Psychology Department is still housed in Baxter Hall, but if you are looking for us this summer, you’ll have to drop by Hays Hall. While the second and third floors of Baxter are being renovated this summer, we have temporarily moved into two classrooms in Hays Hall, one for office space and one for Dr. Gunther’s lab (in which Colin Downey ’15 will be working as the Parks summer research intern).
