YSM Issue 86.3

PSYCHOLOGY
Psychology Professors Wagner and Nolen-Hoeksema
Honored with Lifetime Achievement Awards
BY CRISTAL SUAREZ
The Association for Psychological Science (APS)
recently named Allan Wagner, the James Rowland
Angel Professor Emeritus of Psychology, and Susan
Nolen-Hoeksema, the former chair of the department,
recipients of lifetime achievement awards.
Wagner received the William James Fellow Award,
which celebrates “significant intellectual contributions
to the basic science of psychology.” Wagner’s research
focused on associative learning, which he described
as the “process whereby one event reminds one of
another.” Exploring the mechanisms behind associative
learning, he contributed to the development of
Pavlovian conditioning models such as the Rescorla-
Wagner model (co-authored with
Robert Rescorla of the University of
Pennsylvania).
Later models worked to clarify
characteristics of learning that previous
studies had not fully described.
For example, they addressed how
subsequent appearances of a stimulus
IMMUNOLOGY
IMAGE COURTESY OF THE APS
APS celebrates its 25th
anniversary this year.
School of Medicine Professors Flavell and
Medzhitov Awarded Vilcek Prize
Awarded annually by the Vilcek Foundation to an
immigrant researcher who has made lasting impacts
on American society, the Vilcek Prize in Biomedical
Science will be shared this year by two Yale scientists.
Sterling Professor of Immunobiology Richard
A. Flavell joined Yale to found the Department
of Immunobiology, of which he is currently chair.
Among other accomplishments, Professor Flavell
helped develop a Lyme disease vaccine, showed that
DNA possesses noncoding intron regions, and generated
a more accurate mouse model for studying the
immune system. At Yale, his work has served to elucidate
many intricate workings of the innate immune
system, the body’s first defense against pathogens.
Ruslan M. Medzhitov, David W. Wallace Professor
of Immunobiology, became interested in the innate
immune system early in his career when he read Dr.
Charles A. Janeway, Jr.’s paper proposing its existence.
After joining Janeway’s laboratory at Yale in 1994,
Medzhitov made several groundbreaking findings,
including his discovery of Toll-like receptors that
recognize foreign molecules and activate the innate
immune system. This breakthrough helped launch the
BY JIAHE GU
are not processed and responded to as effectively
when that stimulus is already in active memory.
“Today’s problems are suggested by yesterday’s
solutions,” Wagner said. His work on the fundamentals
of associative learning has influenced areas of
study as varied as the development of causal judgments
in humans and the neurobiology of eyeblink
conditioning in rabbits.
Nolen-Hoeksema, who died on January 2 of this
year, received the James McKeen Cattell Fellow
Award. The award acknowledges “outstanding contributions
to the area of applied psychological research,”
and is awarded to members whose “research addresses
a critical problem in society.”
Nolen-Hoeksema’s research focused
on mental health and included work
on mood regulation. She facilitated the
understanding of gender differences in
depression and worked to direct her SUBJEC
findings into active efforts to intervene
in the development of mental illness.
IMAGE COURTESY OF GAMIL DESIGN
Vilcek Prize trophies are individually designed
by Stefan Sagmeister.
study of the innate immune system, until then largely
unrecognized, into prominence.
Academic honors are often viewed as crowning
achievements, but we can be sure that these two giants
will continue making great discoveries for decades to
come. “It’s a very wonderful thing to be recognized,
and I certainly do appreciate it, but we have to step
back and remember what we’re doing, which is trying
to understand how the world works,” said Flavell.
6 Yale Scientific Magazine | April 2013 www.yalescientific.org