Psychology’s Thompson-Schill and Kahana Honored

Two Penn Arts and Sciences faculty members were recently honored with the Psychonomic Society Mid-Career Award, given for exceptional contributions to the field of experimental and cognitive psychology. Sharon Thompson-Schill, Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology, and Michael Kahana, Professor of Psychology, received the inaugural awards. 

Thompson-Schill’s lab studies the biological bases of human cognitive systems. She uses a combination of psychological and neuroscientific methods, in both healthy and brain-damaged individuals, to study complex thought and behavior, including topics in perception, memory, attention, language, personality and creativity. The Chair of the Department of Psychology, she is also the founding director of MindCORE (Center for Outreach, Research, and Education), an Arts and Sciences initiative that unites researchers and programs across the University involving human intelligence and behavior to promote multidisciplinary collaboration.

Kahana studies human memory and its neural mechanisms, especially episodic memory, spatial memory, and recognition memory. His current research focus, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, is the Restoring Active Memory (RAM) project, an effort aimed at developing next-generation technologies to restore memory function in people who suffer from memory loss due to disease or traumatic injury.

Steven J. Fluharty, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Professor of Psychology, Pharmacology, and Neuroscience, says “We are enormously proud of Sharon and Michael. Their research drives forward our understandings of human intelligence and the brain’s ability to learn, adapt, and heal.”

The Psychonomic Society, founded in 1960, is an international community of cognitive psychologists dedicated to fostering the science of cognition through the advancement and communication of basic research in experimental psychology and allied sciences.