September 2008
Volume 21, Number 8
Cattell Sabbatical Awardees Announced
By Sarah LaRue
Throughout his career, James McKeen Cattell worked to advance psychology to the highest levels. His pioneering use of statistical methods and quantification of data was a central influence in the development of American psychology as an experimental science. In 1921, Cattell helped form the Psychological Corporation, a firm formed to fund psychological research and testing. He later donated 600 of his 1,000 shares of the company to establish the James McKeen Cattell Fund.
The goal of the Cattell Fund is to support “scientific research and the dissemination of knowledge with the object of obtaining results beneficial to the development of the science of psychology and to the advancement of the useful application of psychology.”
In 1974, the James McKeen Cattell Fund Fellowships were created to allow psychological scientists to extend their sabbatical leave for one or two semesters in order to pursue new research. Each year, the Fund supports researchers who, like Cattell, are committed to the scientific study of human behavior and the application of psychological research to improving human welfare.
The Fund and APS have cooperated for years, sharing a vision of promoting psychological science. APS has worked since its inception in 1988 to help publicize the Fund and maintains a representative on the Fund committee. APS is honored to profile each year’s Fund Fellowship recipients. This year’s recipients are Sharon Thompson-Schill, Terrence Deak, and Turhan Canli.
APS Fellow and Board Member Sharon Thompson-Schill is the Class of 1965 Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She received her PhD in cognitive psychology from Stanford University in 1996. She currently runs the NIH-funded Thompson-Schill Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where her team, among other ventures, explores the neural underpinnings of language and memory. She was given the Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society in 2003 and the Lindback Award for Teaching at the University of Pennsylvania in 2006.
Thompson-Schill has a full agenda planned for her sabbatical as she investigates a significant facet of human brain development: the role of the prefrontal cortex in cognitive control and thought regulation. Anatomically, she notes, the human brain is the only primate brain with delayed development of the prefrontal cortex and, therefore, a later expression of thought regulation. Like any scientist, Thompson-Schill wants to know why.
She has recently been studying the brain region’s functionality in its undeveloped state, noting that it represents “the flip side of cognitive control, which might be related to cognitive flexibility, to creativity, and perhaps even to certain types of learning.” Especially noticeable in children, the undeveloped frontal lobes lend themselves to a worldview and learning style influenced much more by external forces than previous ideas or expectations. Thompson-Schill plans to take advantage of her extended sabbatical to launch a research program aimed at exploring the potential benefits of delayed frontal maturation.
Turhan Canli is a neuroscientist and psychologist based at Stony Brook University (a part of the SUNY system). Canli received a PhD from Yale University in 1993 where his research focused on the neural basis of learning and memory in animals. After spending two postdoctoral years at Yale, he switched his focus from the animal brain to the human brain as a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University. There, he studied in the laboratory of Professor John Gabrieli and became one of the first researchers to utilize cognitive neuroscience as an approach to understanding human extraversion and neuroticism.
Canli’s work has been discussed in numerous prominent media outlets, including Time, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and several international radio programs. Canli won the APA Grand Marquis Award for the best publication in Behavioral Neuroscience in 2002 and was granted the Young Investigator Award by the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression (NARSAD). Canli is also a co-founding member and executive board member of the Neuroethics Society.
Since taking up a faculty position at Stony Brook University, Canli has developed a research program on the neurogenetic underpinnings of personality and has recently published the first neuroimaging study on gene-environment interactions for the serotonin transporter gene. His work is now directed at understanding the molecular mechanisms of such interactions, with a particular focus on epigenetics, the study of heritable changes in gene function that occur without a change in the DNA sequence. For example, some epigenetic changes are caused by environmental interactions that may alter the gene expression permanently. Understanding epigenetic mechanisms is such an important advancement in the field of psychology, Canli notes, because they “open the door for life experiences to affect gene expression.”
A significant area of epigenetics that Canli will be exploring during his sabbatical is the impact of stress on one particular mechanism, gene methylation, in humans. Only a small number of such studies have been conducted in rodents, and even less work has been conducted on humans. “The James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Award has given me the freedom to focus exclusively on epigenetic markers of stressful life events on the human genome,” says Canli. He will stay primarily at Stony Brook, where he expects to spend much of his time working hands-on on the lab bench in the Genomics Core Facility. Canli will be keeping busy throughout his entire sabbatical, even far from the lab: He will be writing grants, papers, and chapters, as well as attending molecular biology seminars at the nearby Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
Terrence Deak received both his graduate and doctoral degrees in behavioral neuroscience from the University of Colorado at Boulder and is currently Associate Professor of Psychology at SUNY-Binghamton. In 2006, he was awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation to research the microglial regulation of the neuroendocrine stress response.
Deak’s research has primarily been focused on how organisms respond and adapt to psychologically stressful events. In his recent work, Deak has studied three major aspects of stress response in an organism: basic neurendocrinology, effects on behavior, and interactions with immune function. Most existing research models this three-tiered stress response as three discrete research topics. Deak chose instead to base his studies on a cohesive model of stress response, noting the large amount of overlap among the neural mechanisms underlying stress-induced neuroendocrine, behavioral, and immune functions. His forward thinking and innovative strategies have advanced the field of knowledge on stress response.
Deak will spend his sabbatical traveling to multiple laboratories and scientific meetings that would “otherwise be impossible to accomplish during the normal academic year” to focus on advancing both technique development and extensive theoretical work. Currently, he is at the University of Colorado in Boulder to learn procedures that will allow his SUNY-Binghamton lab to use more sophisticated techniques in the study of neuroinflammatory consequences of exposure to stress. In addition, he is planning the development and exposition of a review paper summarizing the relationship between neuroinflammation and multiple psychological disorders. Deak would like to see his research “move beyond the elegant cellular and molecular findings of the past decade toward a bigger picture of how neuroinflammatory processes—in tandem with the stress response—shape both normal and abnormal brain processes across the lifespan.” ♦
