Early Career Award Recipients
Award Qualifications
| Eligible Period: | ≤10 years after terminal degree1. |
| Description: | Independent research contribution with at minimum, a national reputation, and appropriate productivity. |
| INS Membership Required: | No |
| Requirements: | (1) nomination letter and at least, (1) letter of support |
| Presentation Yes/No: | Yes, about research |
| Annual/Mid-Year: | Both |
Award Recipients
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 50th Annual Meeting
New Orleans, Virtual Meeting – February 2-4, 2022
As neuropsychology is expanding across the world, there is increasing awareness that testing in the most proficient language is crucial for sensitivity of an assessment. Although neuropsychologists are working with their counterparts in other countries,there is a dearth of assessments available in respective native languages. In Tamil Nadu as well as the rest of India, like inmany other parts of the world, the very few neuropsychologists are concentrated in the Tier 1 cities leaving a void in access to evidence based healthcare for significant sections of populations.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 2021 Mid-Year Meeting
Melbourne, Australia – June 30 – July 3, 2021
Muireann demonstrates an intellectual prowess and intuition for neuropsychological research that is truly exemplary. Upon her arrival in Australia, following a 2-year career break, she established a highly successful research program investigating how progressive degeneration of functional brain networks disrupts complex expressions of memory in dementia. This work had not previously been conducted in Australia and is testament to Muireann’s innovative approach, complementing and extending ongoing studies in the FRONTIER group. Shortly after arriving, Muireann published a first author review on functional brain network alterations in dementia in Nature Reviews Neurology.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 49th Annual Meeting
San Diego, Virtual Meeting – February 2-5, 2021
The incidence of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) differs across racial/ethnic groups, even after controlling for socioeconomic status and vascular diseases. My research program seeks to understand these persistent inequalities by examining whether: (1) known ADRD risk factors exhibit differential impact across race/ethnicity; and/or (2) unrecognized ADRD risk factors exist for racial/ethnic groups with a history of marginalization in the United States. To provide evidence for each of these explanations, I will present data from multiple racially/ethnically diverse, longitudinal studies of cognitive aging in the United States. Compared to non-Hispanic Whites, marginalized racial/ethnic groups face more social and economic constraints, are more likely to live in under-resourced neighborhoods, and more frequently encounter negative environmental messages that can corrode biopsychosocial resources. In the face of these inequities, many of these groups also demonstrate greater engagement in culturally-relevant protective factors. In this talk, I will focus on pathways by which racially-patterned psychosocial factors get under the skin and into the skull to shape ADRD inequalities.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 2020 Mid-Year Meeting
Virtual Event Meeting – July 1-2, 2020
As a PhD candidate at Radboud University, supervised by Ardi Roelofs and Herbert Schriefers, I did research on the role of executive control in word production using behavioural methods, scalp electrophysiology, and functional MRI. Halfway into my PhD, I initiated my own, independent, research programme on the electrophysiology of language production in healthy speakers. I then obtained personal post-doctoral funding to go to the University of California Berkeley and expand my research towards populations with acquired language impairment. Under the mentoring of Bob Knight and Nina Dronkers, I used intracranial and scalp electrophysiology to investigate the neurophysiological underpinnings of language and language neuroplasticity.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 48th Annual Meeting
Denver, Colorado, USA – February 5-8, 2020
The expansion of the scientific literature on performance validity tests (PVTs) in the past decades has greatly enriched the knowledge base of clinical neuropsychology, shaped the field’s practice guidelines, and encouraged ongoing epistemological reflections on the nature of cognitive testing.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 2019 Mid-Year Meeting
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil – July 10-12, 2019
Lack of awareness about having an ilness, its symptoms or consequences, also termed anosognosia or loss of insight, is frequent in a number of neurological and psychiatric conditions. In my presentation, the development of a research program to investigate this topic is discussed, indicating how clinical observations and insights can provide the basis for the creation of theoretical models, which, in turn, lead to predictions and testable hypotheses. Empirical evidence obtained from studies exploring self-awareness in people with dementia and bipolar disorder is presented, including experimental and observational work collecting behavioural and neuroimaging data. Findings from these studies are discussed in relation to the development of new clinical interventions and refinement of theoretical models.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 47th Annual Meeting
New York City, New York, USA – February 20-23, 2019
Fatigue is another dopamine-dependent construct that has been shown to rely on the fronto-striatal brain regions and is a symptom that individuals with MS and TBI often experience. Given this neural common denominator between fatigue and outcome processing, I investigated whether fatigue can be reduced through engaging individuals with MS and TBI in a goal-directed behavior, showing that fatigue can be reduced through outcome presentation.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 2018 Mid-Year Meeting
Prague, Czech Republic – July 18-20, 2018
Our study challenged the retrieval deficit and the associative deficit hypotheses of memory impairments in Parkinson’s disease (PD). The former supports a memory deficit mediated by attention/executive dysfunctions, while the latter hypothesizes a genuine memory impairment in PD.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 46th Annual Meeting
Washington, D.C, USA – February 14-17, 2018
Major depressive disorder (MDD) is the most prevalent psychiatric disorder, affecting between 10 and 20 % of the world population at some point in their lives. MDD is characterized by a high risk for relapse after recovery (40% within 2 years). Therefore, understanding and changing the highly recurrent course of MDD is of high clinical and societal importance.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 45th Annual Meeting
New Orleans, Louisiana, USA – February 1-4, 2017
Much of what we know about brain-behavior relations is made possible by the study of neuropsychological cases. Given the ubiquity of functional neuroimaging studies, and the importance they have assumed in elucidating brain function, the goal of my talk is to describe how single cases continue to challenge accepted dogma, to lead to new discoveries, and to suggest hypotheses and theories that steer the field in new directions.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 2016 Mid-Year Meeting
London, England, UK – July 6-8, 2016
Katerina studied cognitive neuropsychology and theoretical psychoanalysis at University College London (UCL) before completing her PhD on the neuropsychology of confabulation at the University of Durham, UK. She is currently an Associate Professor (Reader) at the Research Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology at UCL.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 44th Annual Meeting
Boston, Massachusetts, USA – February 3-6, 2016
Memory deficits characterize Alzheimer’s disease and its clinical precursor amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI). While a growing body of research furthers our understanding of the detection, characterization, and neuroanatomy of these memory deficits, the clinical translation of these findings has lagged. So, providers continue to be faced with the critical question of “What can I do about it?” Treatment is typically limited to a handful of medications that are, at best, marginally successful. This limitation has fostered a growing interest in non-pharmacologic treatment methods for minimizing learning and memory deficits, approaches that include cognitive training and cognitive rehabilitation.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 43rd Annual Meeting
Denver, Colorado, USA – February 4-7, 2015
Through a journey from toddlerhood to adolescence, this talk will provide a multimodal perspective of the impact of pediatric traumatic brain injury (TBI) on social functioning. The emergence of socially meaningful interactions, better perspective taking, greater social independence and more complex societal roles and responsibilities are key milestones of social development. Brain disruptions occurring at any stage along this path can disturb the delicate balance of environmental, cerebral, and cognitive processes underlying social competence, leading to inappropriate social behaviors.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 42nd Annual Meeting
Seattle, Washington, USA – February 12-15, 2014
As the population ages, unhealthy cognitive decline and dementia are increasingly important public health issues. Vascular risk factors, such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and atherosclerosis, are associated with abnormal neuroanatomic changes, cognitive impairment, and clinical dementia in older adults. A poorly understood aspect of compromised vascular health and cognitive aging is the association between systemic hemodynamics (cardiac output or the amount of blood exiting the heart to perfuse the system) and brain aging.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 40th Annual Meeting
Montreal, Quebec, Canada – February 15-18, 2012
Dr. Brickman uses advanced neuroimaging techniques to understand cognitive aging and dementia. He is particularly interested in white matter abnormalities and the intersection between vascular disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Ongoing Research: The effect of age on neuromorphology and its cognitive consequences. His current research efforts focus primarily on “normal” cognitive and structural changes across the adult lifespan.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 39th Annual Meeting
Boston, Massachusetts, USA – February 2-5, 2011
John Gunstad is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Kent State University. He obtained a B.A. in psychology from Moorhead State University and both his M.S. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology with concentration in clinical neuropsychology from Ohio University. He completed internship and F32 postdoctoral fellowship at Brown Medical School, where he began a line of research in the neurocognitive effects of medical conditions including obesity and cardiovascular disease.
Early Career Research Award Recipient
INS 36th Annual Meeting
Waikoloa, Hawaii, USA – February 6-9, 2008