Campus honors Lana Fish, PBS Human Resources Coordinator, at Staff Merit Award ceremony

On Monday, December 16, IU Provost Lauren Robel led the annual ceremony to celebrate the “remarkable accomplishments” of six exceptional IUB staff members. Not surprisingly, beloved PBS Human Resources Coordinator Lana Fish was among them. The others were Jay Owens, Douglas J. Burcham, and James Robert Gregg from the Physical Plant, Jennifer Mitchner from SPEA and David Sprinkle in Physics.

Now in its 34^th year, the award ceremony is a unique occasion to recognize the immense contributions of IUB staff. Provost Robel set the tone by calling attention to these 5,400 individuals whose work each day literally makes the whole academic enterprise run.

To stand out in such a crowd is no small feat, but if anyone can, it is Lana, who has served the department since 1983, first as clinic coordinator, then as human resources coordinator for the whole department.

The nomination letters for the award passionately and persuasively convey those qualities that made it possible for her do so.

“Hiring Lana Fish,” said one, “proved to be one of the best decisions of my career. As the department’s most dedicated, caring, cheerful, unselfish, reliable, competent, and beloved staff member, she has kept the department running smoothly, happily, and efficiently for many years. With her unassuming, unflappable, loyal, generous, and unerringly competent style, Lana is the consummate example of the ideal professional staff member.  IU has been graced by her unsurpassed service.”

“She was my wise mentor,” said another, “training me not to take issues personally, to open my mind to all sides kindly, but logically, to make the best decision for the department, and then to implement that decision transparently, firmly, but with respect for all involved. In summary, this is an outstanding human being and professional who–every day–makes Psychological and Brain Sciences, and IU, work, and does this with a life wisdom that is truly inspirational.”

Or as a third explained, she has been the confidant of four successive chairs, the most senior faculty as well as first-year faculty and graduate students. “Unmatched in her skill, professionalism, diplomacy, and character, her wisdom and unwavering commitment to the good of the whole has made her the bedrock of our department.”

As for Lana herself, she is overcome with emotion in describing the event, especially the response of PBS colleagues, who made up a disproportionately large part of the audience: “To see PBS standing up and cheering, all that support, it was overwhelming.”

Three-time Olympic coach and PBS Professor of Practice Jeffrey Huber wins USA Diving's 2013 National Diving Coach of the Year Award

 

Former US Olympic coach and current Psychological and Brain Sciences Professor of Practice Jeffrey Huber may have put his coaching career behind him, but he is still winning awards. At a special award ceremony on December 20 in Austin, Texas, at the USA Diving Winter National Championships, Huber will receive the 2013 National Diving Coach of the Year Award, which follows the success of his team at the 2013 National Diving Championship. This is the thirteenth time he has won the award since 1998.

Insofar as the award is based on his team’s performance at the 2013 national competition, Huber insists, "It is really their award as much as it is mine."

Huber’s Indiana Diving team won the overall team championship title at the 2013 AT&T National Diving Championships. The IU men's team won the men's team title and the women's team finished third as a team. Four of Huber's athletes represented Team USA in international competitions in 2013, including Amy Cozad, who competed for Team USA at the2013 FINA World Championships in Barcelona, Spain.

Cozad, now an assistant diving coach at Florida State University, gives us a glimpse into Huber's coaching style and the strategy behind his success. "He has absolute confidence in the abilities of his divers," she explains, "and instills this confidence in them. Within my first week at IU he pulled me into his office and said if you do everything I tell you, you will be in the 2012 Olympics." (He was not far off. At the 2012 Olympic trials, Cozad came in third, but only the top two divers made the Olympic team. She competed in nearly every other international diving event while being coached by Huber at Indiana University.)

He would also recreate the conditions, psychological and otherwise, of a competition, in their everyday practice and training. As Cozad explained, "He always said that because competition and practice are so different, you need to consider how you will be thinking under the stress of competition and prepare yourself for those circumstances."

Huber was head diving coach at IU from 1989 to 2013. He received the highest national and international honors and awards for his coaching, including three-time US Olympic Coach, USOC National Coach of the Year, NCAA Diving Coach of the Year, Big Ten Diving Coach of the Year for the men's and women's teams almost every year between 1992 and 2013, and four-time winner of the US National Diving Championship Coach of Excellence Award.

Huber is especially proud of the most recent award. “Coming at the end of a 37-year career, it means a great deal to me. It tells me that I finished my career as I started it, by giving 100% effort to my athletes, my profession, and my university.”

This spring Huber will be teaching a PBS course on the psychology of human performance, which will explore the application of psychological theories to elite-level athletic performance and other types of motor-learning and performance, such as dance, theatre, physical education, and physical therapy. Huber will also be teaching Introductory Psychology.

In the above photo: Back row, left to right: Jeffrey Huber, John Wingfield, Andrew Hull, Danton Rogers, Conor Murphy, Casey Johnson. Front row: Chris Heaton, Amy Cozad, Kate Hillman, Zach Cooper, Toby Stanley, Michael Mosca, and Darian Schmidt

Read more about the award at USA Diving: http://www.usadiving.org/whats-new/2013/11/usa-diving-announces-annual-award-winners/

Glenn Close's IU visit includes a discussion on stigma and mental illness with PBS professor Olaf Sporn's Themester class on "The Connected Brain"

On November 5, Glenn Close stopped in on PBS professor Olaf Sporn's P457 seminar, "The Connected Brain," as part of her trip to the campus to raise awareness of mental illness and combat the stigma that surrounds it. Accompanied by IU sociologist Bernice Pescosolido, who studies stigma and mental health, the class visit followed her large public lecture at the Whittenberger Auditorium. Sporns’ course is one of the 2013 Themester course offerings related to “Networks in a Complex World” and the discussion started with a question of how social networks might or might not help raise awareness and combat stigma.

Undergraduate Senior Elliot Layden asked a question on whether knowledge of the physical or organic causes of mental illness might help to reverse its stigma. Close responded with an anecdote that suggested it might not.

On a visit to a graduate neuroscience lab at a large, prestigious university, she spent some time with the graduate students in the lab. One woman in particular had stood out as a really articulate, star student among them. When Close got up to go to the bathroom, the woman followed her out and came up to her weeping. She told Close that she suffered from serious depression and could never divulge this to others in the lab or she would lose their respect and her standing in the lab.

Sporns further explored the issue, pointing out the way such “organic or physical causes” themselves have complex relationships to the world in which they exist. Social experience, including the experience of being stigmatized, can affect and alter brain chemistry and function. He called attention to the work being done on embodiment that reveals the complex way in which the physical structures and functions of the brain respond to and are shaped by social and environmental phenomena.

Pescosolido added to this with the notion that for this reason, it was necessary for many fields to come together to tackle the topic: neuroscientists and psychologists, anthropologist and sociologists, to name a few. No single view can capture the complexity of mental illness and stigma.

“We are now trying to work together,” she explained, “so we can see how the brain, how social relationships, how different social contexts all work together in terms of changing the brain, changing people’s lives, because we now know it’s very complex. We now know all of those things are working together in concert.”

Mary Murphy an APS "Rising Star" Award Winner

Congratulations to Mary Murphy!

Mary has just been named a 2013 Rising Star by the American Psychological Society. Look for her profile in the May/June issue of the APS Observer. As noted by APS, the award places Mary "among an impressive cohort of individuals who in the early stages of their career are already making significant contributions in psychological science."

Mary joins previous recipients of this prestigious award from our department, Brian D'Onofrio in 2012 and BJ Rydell in 2011.

One strand of her research seeks to broaden our understanding of interracial interactions and offer strategies to improve them. In work she began this January she examines the challenges faced in one-on-one interracial interactions between White, Black, and Latino individuals. The study examines how two factors--the racial diversity of an interaction partner’s friendship network and the goals they adopt for the interaction--influence both partners' experiences.

Her hope is to "illuminate factors and mechanisms underlying positive interracial interaction so that we can create a diverse society that works together."
 

A second strand of her research focuses on structural and contextual barriers for women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math.  Here she is developing the "cues hypothesis" that suggests that subtle situational cues in the environment can trigger experiences of identity threat, decreased belonging, and decreased desire to persist in these environments.  These subtle situational cues may have powerful and far-reaching effects for potential targets of stereotypes and stigma. 

 

Her aims here are to make those cues visible and to understand the mechanisms underlying them so that, through interventions, identity-threatening cues are less likely to hamper the lives of stigmatized people.

APA PsyTalks video series debuts with a talk by IU distinguished professor and chancellor's professor Linda Smith on how babies learn

The inaugural episode of PsyTalks, APA's series of 'TED-style' presentations by prominent psychologists, features IU distinguished professor and chancellor’s professor of psychological and brain sciences, Linda Smith, with an explanation of how movement and sight determine how babies learn.

As part of its public education campaign, APA is launching a video series titled PsyTalks with an episode explaining how babies' movements provide the experiences from which they learn. Linda Smith, distinguished professor and chancellor's professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana University, hosts the episode, the first featuring psychology's leading researchers discussing their latest findings.

Check out Linda Smith's APA PsyTalk here:
       
http://www.apa.org/pubs/newsletters/access/2013/02-12/babies-learn.aspx