I am the Regents Centennial Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. My early research dealt with physical symptoms and health, which eventually merged into the discovery of expressive writing. When people are asked to write about emotional upheavals for 3-4 days for 15-20 minutes a day, their physical and mental health often improves compared to controls. There are now over 2,000 studies on expressive writing from labs around the world that continue to show the value of this method. For the last 25 years, my team has focused on computerized text analysis as a way of understanding and measuring people’s social behaviors and psychological states. Our text analysis program, LIWC, is well known in psychology, business, and computer science.  

I have been continuously funded by NSF, NIH, and other federal agencies since 1983 and have published over 300 articles and written or edited 12 books. I enjoyed serving as chair of UT’s Psychology Department from 2005-2014 and president of the Society of Personality and Social Psychology in 2014. I have received several honors for my research (e.g., American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Social and Personality Society’s Distinguished Scholar, APA’s Distinguished Contributions to Applications in Psychology, the Pavlovian Award, APS’s William James Fellow Award) and teaching (UT’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers). 

I love the field of psychology. For purely selfish reasons, I’d like to nudge APS to 1) expand the scope of psychological science to encourage cross-disciplinary research and collaboration; 2) rethink our funding models to support open access publishing; 3) discuss ways to modernize graduate training to prioritize cross-disciplinary academic and non-academic jobs; 4) become a more culturally diverse and international association; 5) remind our field that doing science is a fun and meaningful enterprise. 

Elke Weber is a cognitive psychologist and Gerhard R. Andlinger Professor in Energy and the Environment and Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University, where she founded and directs the Behavioral Science for Policy Lab, with appointments in psychology, public affairs, and engineering. Her early research examined the psychological and cultural determinants of risk taking in financial and other domains. More recently her work has explored how social identity, social networks, and social norms influence decisions and shown how this knowledge can be used to create decision environments with promise for altering behaviors. She combines theory and tools from psychology with those of neighboring disciplines, including economics and evolutionary biology, to understand human decision making in complex and dynamic situations, in particular responses to the global threat posed by climate change.  

She has advised bodies of the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, a joint commission of Sustainability Council of the German government and the German National Academy of Sciences, and the US Environmental Protection Agency. She served as Lead Author for the 5th and 6th Assessment Reports of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, chairs the Science Advisory Boards of the Beijer Institute for Ecological Economics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and serves on the science advisory boards of the Stockholm Resilience Center and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.  

A member of APS since 1990, Weber served on its Board of Directors 2008-2011. She is past president of three psychological societies (Neuroeconomics, Judgment and Decision Making, and Mathematical Psychology) and a member of both the German and the US National Academy of Sciences. She has received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Society for Risk Analysis, the Patrick Suppes Prize from the American Philosophical Society, and the Frontiers of Knowledge Award. 

Willem Frankenhuis is an Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam and a senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Crime, Security and Law. He aims to develop a unified understanding of the ways in which humans and other animals adapt to their environments, across generations through natural selection, and within lifetimes via plasticity and learning. In his empirical work, he studies hidden talents—abilities enhanced by adversity—and reasonable responses to adverse conditions, even if these responses entail costs. In his theoretical work, he uses mathematical modeling to explore the adaptive value of windows of heightened plasticity in development, and to understand how experiences shape the features of these windows, such as their timing and duration. He is the recipient of various awards, including the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, the APS Rising Star honor, the APA Boyd McCandless Award, an Early Career Research Fellowship of the Jacobs Foundation, an Early Career Award from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, a New Investigator Award of the European Human Behaviour and Evolution Association, VENI and VIDI awards from the Dutch Research Council, and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. Given the importance of viewing people’s strengths and struggles in context, Frankenhuis directs an international network of diverse early-career researchers aiming to foster balanced public discourse (via science communication products) on human development in stressful environments. He is committed to producing transparent and reproducible scholarship and to promoting healthy incentives in academia. 

Amy Orben is a UKRI Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Cambridge, where she directs the Digital Mental Health Group at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. She is also a Fellow of St. John’s College. Orben’s internationally renowned research program investigates the link between digital technology use and adolescent mental health, using diverse research methods taken from cognitive, developmental, quantitative, social, and personality psychology. She advises governments and policymakers around the world, including the US Surgeon General and the UK Secretary of State for Education, and is a member of the British Academy Public Policy Committee.  

Orben has received numerous prestigious awards for her research (e.g., APS Rising Star honors and British Psychological Society Award for Outstanding Contributions to Doctoral Research) and efforts to improve research culture and practice (e.g., UK Medical Research Council Impact Prize and Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science Mission Award). Orben co-founded ReproducibiliTea, one of the most successful grassroots open science and research culture campaigns to date, whose journal clubs have reached 100+ universities worldwide. To further enable positive change across the discipline she recently became Associate Editor at Psychological Science and is an active member of a range of advisory boards and committees for funders, government departments and research organizations. 

In a time of worldwide crises—whether they be social, environmental, or political— APS has a crucial role to play in encouraging our discipline to address, and adapt to, huge challenges. Orben is committed to amplifying the voices, concerns, and aspirations of psychologists—especially those early in their career—who are committed to doing great research, while also caring deeply about issues such as societal relevance, environmental sustainability, equal opportunities, as well as research culture and quality.

Yukiko Uchida is a director and professor at the Institute for the Future of Human Society (IFoHS) at Kyoto University, where she also leads the Cultural Psychology lab. She is affiliated with the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University, where her students are enrolled. Uchida has conducted extensive empirical research in cultural psychology, focusing on international and regional comparative studies on happiness and well-being, self and social relations, and emotions. Her work has resulted in numerous high-impact publications and significant contributions to social activities.  

Uchida has authored over 200 academic papers published in top social psychology journals, including JPSP and Psychological Science. She has served on the editorial boards of international journals such as Cognition and Emotion and has been an invited keynote speaker at various international conferences. She has received many awards, including Kyoto University’s Best Female Researcher Award, the Japanese Psychological Association International Encouragement Award, and several paper and presentation awards from academic societies. She was also selected as an APS Fellow. Currently, she is a member of the program committee for the APS annual convention. Her achievements extend to numerous international collaborative research projects and co-authored papers with interdisciplinary researchers, though which she has disseminated impactful research results.  

Uchida has established solid relationships with corporations and national governments, showcasing outstanding abilities in research exchange and the social dissemination of research findings. She was a member of the Cabinet Office’s Study Group on Well-being, contributing to the development of well-being indices. She also drafted initiatives for the Ministry of Education’s Central Commission about well-being in education, where she continues to significantly influence the implementation of well-being in society. Through her experience, she believes it is important to foster global and interdisciplinary discussions within APS, especially as current social issues become increasingly complex. 

Pamela Davis-Kean is a Professor of Psychology and also a Research Professor at the Institute for Social Research (ISR) at the University of Michigan, where she directs the Human Development and Quantitative Methods Research Lab and most recently was the Associate Director for the Michigan Institute for Data Science and AI (MIDAS). Davis-Kean’s research and publications range from examining the self-concept of ability in mathematical achievement to how the socioeconomic status of parents (primarily parent educational attainment) relates to their parenting beliefs and behaviors. This research has been published in major developmental and family journals. Davis-Kean has been on multiple editorial boards and is currently the Deputy Editor at Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science (AMPPS). She was elected a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science (APS) in 2013 and has held multiple service positions with APS, including being the Developmental Program Chair from 2012 to 2014 and the Program Chair from 2014 to 2016. Davis-Kean has been continually funded by NSF and NIH grants that have supported her research using population data to study inequalities in cognitive development. For a decade, she directed an NSF grant to support an Interdisciplinary Collaborative Development Science Center (CAPCA) focused on replication across longitudinal studies around the world. She is a proponent of the use of Open Science methods to increase rigor, transparency, and data sharing in the psychological community and considers this an important issue to continue to build and work on at APS. Davis-Kean also sees intra- and interdisciplinary research as an important contribution to psychological research and looks forward to thinking of ways to promote these connections in the future. 

Jeffrey Girard studies how affective and interpersonal information is communicated through verbal and nonverbal behavior, as well as how such communication is influenced by individual differences (e.g., personality and mental health) and social factors (e.g., culture and context). This work is deeply interdisciplinary and spans multiple areas of social science, computer science, statistics, and medicine. He is interested in answering both methodological and substantive questions, as well as promoting the integration and sharing of insights and tools across disparate areas (e.g., blending statistics and machine learning, studying emotional expression on social media, and developing open-source research software). Girard completed a PhD in Clinical Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh and a postdoctoral research fellowship in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is Erik M. Wright Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Kansas, where he directs the Affective Communication and Computing research laboratory, the interdisciplinary “Brain, Behavior, and Quantitative Science” doctoral program, and the Kansas Data Science Consortium (a collaboration of educators enhancing data science capacity and capability across the state of Kansas, funded by an NSF EPSCoR grant). He is Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing and Collabora Psychology journals and Consulting Editor for the Clinical Psychological Science, Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, and NPP Digital Psychiatry and Neuroscience journals. Finally, he is dedicated to the methodological advancement of psychological science and is co-founder of SMaRT Workshops LLC, which provides statistics, methods, and research training to hundreds of researchers each year. Girard hopes to support APS’s missions of advancing scientific psychology across disciplinary borders and increasing its transparency, openness, and reproducibility. As human life and psychological science become increasingly infused with technology, and research samples become increasingly large and complex, interdisciplinary collaboration with computer science and data science will only become increasingly important. 

As a member of the APS Board of Directors, Kevin M. King seeks to broaden engagement with APS’s efforts to improve the transparency of psychological science to all subdisciplines within the field, as well as enhance the rigor of research practices. He aims to highlight structural and systemic barriers to conducting and disseminating transparent research, and how needed structural and systematic changes may impact the diversity of researchers and research topics. King is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Washington, where he directs the Regulation, Affect, and Development Lab. His research integrates developmental, personality, and clinical science perspectives to understand when, why, and how some people struggle to control or regulate their thoughts, feelings, and emotions. He is especially interested in how general problems with behavior and emotion regulation are related to the development of alcohol and cannabis use disorders. King is also dedicated to improving the implementation of quantitative methods in psychological research. He is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and has been a leader in adopting Open Science practices in clinical psychology through the use of pre-registrations and registered reports. King has received over $10 million in federal funding as a Principal Investigator, $30 million in funding as a Co-Investigator, and over $1 million in mentored training awards. He served as the Senior Editor for Clinical Psychology at Collabra: Psychology, is currently an Associate Editor at Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, and is an Editorial Board member of several leading journals in clinical psychology (Journal of Psychopathology and Clinical Science, Clinical Psychological Science, Assessment). He has been a standing panel member of several NIH grant review panels (AA-3 and ARM). He also co-hosts “That Implementation Science Podcast,” which brings current developments in implementation science to an audience of dozens.