Members > APS Awards and Honors > APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions

APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions

The APS Janet Taylor Spence Award recognizes APS members who have made transformative early career contributions to psychological science.

Research contributions can be transformative in various ways, such as the establishment of new approaches or paradigms within a field of psychological science, or the development or advancement of boundary-crossing research.  Award recipients reflect the best of the many new and cutting edge ideas coming from of our most creative and promising investigators who together embody the future of psychological science.

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View a list of Spence Award Recipients

Remembering Janet Taylor Spence

APS Janet Taylor Spence Award Committee

Kurt Gray, Chair
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Ramona Bobocel, Member
University of Waterloo
Oriel FeldmanHall, Member
Brown University
Willem Frankenhuis, Member
Utrecht University
Eiko Fried, Member
Leiden University
Tania Lombrozo, Member
Princeton University

Improving psychological well-being and family functioning in Black families. Identifying factors that shape motivation and self-control. Improving how children learn. Through these areas of research and others, the six awardees of the APS 2023 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions are just getting started making significant contributions to psychological science for the benefit of science and society. First awarded in 2010 and named after APS’s first president, the Spence Award honors particularly creative and promising APS members who embody the future of the field.  

Learn more about the six 2023 awardees.

Read about and listen to interviews with 2022 Spence awardees on APS’s Under the Cortex podcast, and stay tuned for podcast interviews with the 2023 recipients. 

2023 Award Winners

Riana Elyse Anderson
University of Michigan

Hengchen Dai
UCLA Anderson School of Management

Emily Fyfe
Indiana University

Julian Jara-Ettinger
Yale University

Calvin Lai
Washington University in St. Louis

Ed O’Brien
The University of Chicago Booth School of Business