Honors & Achievements
Spring 2024
IOG Trainees Excel
The Department of Psychology at WSU holds an annual competition of graduate research presented via posters. Allison Moll and Alexis Chargo – both pre-doctoral trainees at the IOG – won top awards.
Alexis (mentored by Dr. Ana Daugherty) studies cognitive neuroscience, especially spatial navigation and age-related cognitive decline. She won a Rumble Fellowship for next year and recently had a paper accepted for publication. IOG trainee Parisa Vahidi also won a Rumble Fellowship.
Allison (mentored by Dr. John Woodard) is a clinical psychology student studying memory and the early detection of Alzheimer’s Disease. She received the Neitzel Summer Fellowship and the Charles Gdowski Award for research.
Hooray for Women Scientists!
Dr. Clara Zundel is a behavioral neuroscientist and member of the IOG Postdoctoral Professional Development group. She also serves as an Early Career Policy Ambassador for the Society for Neuroscience, which featured her work as part of Women’s History Month. Scan the QR code to hear her uplifting message.
A New Doctor
Roya Homayouni, a graduate in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, successfully defended her dissertation on memory development. “Roya did a phenomenal job delivering a masterful defense of her rigorous, significant, and exciting dissertation project. Truly an inspiration!,” said committee co-chair Noa Ofen, Ph.D.
A former IOG pre-doc, Dr. Homayouni has now joined the IOG Postdoctoral Professional Development group. She graduated with nine peer-reviewed publications, 20 abstract and podium presentations at international conferences, and several accolades, including a Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan research award.
Crossing the Lifespan
The IOG and the Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute partnered in 2008 to create the Lifespan Alliance for research and training covering birth to old age. Each year, students from both institutes present posters and speeches of their research projects, competing for awards from WSU judges. This year’s research day displayed 22 posters with four presentations, on topics from racial trauma in adolescence and mental health, to the impact of multiple sclerosis on virtual navigation. IOG winners were Alexis Chargo and Carmen Chek for their research posters, and Kimberly Shay for her oral presentation.
Academy of Scholars
IOG Director Peter Lichtenberg, Ph.D., has been elected into the exclusive Academy of Scholars at Wayne State, for his outstanding excellence in scholarship and in creative achievement. The Scholars bring together WSU’s most prominent academic experts and celebrated researchers to raise the scholastic prestige of the university and promote interdisciplinary intellectual interchange at all levels. “I am deeply honored,” Dr. Lichtenberg said. Election into the Academy is considered WSU’s highest recognition of a faculty member by colleagues.
Outstanding Mentor
Associate Professor Jessica Robbins-Panko is a social and medical anthropologist teaching an array of graduate classes. Her dedication to teaching and impact on her students has been significant, so it was gratifying to see her win the 2024 Graduate Program Outstanding Mentor Award in social sciences. Dr. Robbins-Panko was selected for her ability to advise, support, sponsor and inspire graduate students as they move toward completion of their degrees.
Spring 2023
Presidential Honors
Peter Lichtenberg, Ph.D., welcomed 3,200 people from 38 countries to the Gerontological Society of America's annual meeting in December. As the 2022 president, Dr. Lichtenberg provided opening remarks at the Indianapolis event and welcomed the keynote speaker Pulitzer Prize-winning author Isabel Wilkerson. Being elected GSA president and hosting the annual scientific conference was, "one of the greatest honors of my lifetime," Dr. Lichtenberg said. IOG faculty and students had an out-sized presence at the conference with involvement in more than 30 different panels, presentations and sessions.
Focus on Hispanic and Latino Populations
IOG trainee Emily 
Flores won the Mercedes Florez Memorial Research Award for her work on, "Financial exploitation in Spanish-speaking older adults." The project combines Emily's passions for culturally appropriate psychological assessment, psychometrics and gerontology. The annual award is presented to a graduate student researching the impact of Alzheimer's disease on Latinx older adults. It is sponsored by the Michigan Center for Contextual Factors in Alzheimer's Disease.
Emily also launched a LatinXcellence organization for Wayne State graduate students to offer collaboration, networking, resources and mentorship while preserving and celebrating Latinx culture. The group kicked off with a well-attended Trivia Night last October and continues to foster a safe space for Hispanic and Latino students to drive positive change on WSU's campus. Emily's co-mentor is Dr. Lichtenberg.
Lifespan Research Day 2023
From Birth to Old Age
IOG trainee Alexis Chargo won 1st place in the poster presentation for her work on "Age and Sex-Related Differences in Cognitive Map Recall." Youjin Jung won 2nd place for "Plasma Neurofilament Light Relates to Hippocampal Volume and Memory but Not Functional Connectivity." Trainee Kimberly Shay also took 2nd place in the paper presentations with her case study, "Generativity and the Lasting Impact of Community." Kim also won GSA's Diversity Fellowship Award for 2022-23.
The Lifespan Day judges spent a great deal of time deliberating and noted that it was incredibly difficult to choose just two winners per category. "They were impressed by the quality of research, the breadth and strengths across the work, and the excellence in presentation skills," Dr. Perry said.
Grant Supports Research on Art for Persons with Dementia
Trainee Laura Sutherland received two competitive awards for her dissertation project, "How Art Activities Influence Social Relations of Persons with Dementia: An Ethnographic Exploration." The first was a $5,000 Research Stimulus Award from Wayne State's Office of the Provost. The second was a $3,000 student award from the Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan Foundation. Her paper, "Art in Dementia Care: How Art Activities with Persons with Dementia are Emerging After a Period of Lockdown," was also accepted for presentation at the Society for Applied Anthropology 2023 meeting.
Leadership in Cognitive Neuroscience
IOG's Cognitive Neuroscience group, with multiple labs, has been awarded large grants to start or continue major research projects. Dr. Jeske Damoiseaux directs the group; Dr. Ana Daugherty directs the Healthy Brain Aging Laboratory and Dr. Voyko Kavcic heads the Electra Study on a non-invasive technique for early detection of Alzheimer's disease. The group and its many graduate and undergraduate student assistants publish more than a dozen peer-reviewed papers each year. Dr. Daugherty leads a longitudinal study on age-related changes in the brain that has followed hundreds of participants and is now in its 22nd year.
Senior Housing Preservation-Detroit Award
IOG Training Director Tam Perry, Ph.D., won the 2023 Rothman Award for Structural Change Practice. The competitive award from the Special Commission to Advance Macro Social Work recognizes research in social work that results in transformative societal change at the macro level. The winners reflect social work's promise to change conditions that affect people, not simply to change people affected by conditions. Dr. Perry studies housing transitions, such as aging in place versus moving, and the complex decisions, emotions, finances and physical burdens involved in relocating. For the Senior Housing Coalition, she designed a comprehensive method to measure older adult's social, mental and physical well-being as it relates to where they live.
Fall 2022
Insights into Memory Development
Qin Yin, an IOG trainee in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, won the 2022 Elizabeth Olson Memorial Award for the best written paper in gerontology. "Neurophysiological mechanisms of memory formation: Insights from intracranial EEG and implications for the study of memory development," emerged from her work with Dr. Noa Ofen's lab with children who must have electrodes implanted in their brain to treat drug-resistant epilepsy. This Olson competition, with a cash prize of $500, is open to IOG pre-doctoral trainees and supports the pursuit of high-quality scholarly insights and practice ideals.
Beaumont Research Scientist
Formerly an award winning pre-doctoral fellow at the IOG, Dr. Mohammad Toseef recently accepted a position as Health Economist Research Scientist at Beaumont Health. His doctorate is in economics from Wayne State, and he worked as a Prevention Effectiveness Fellow at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for the past two years. Dr. Toseef won numerous awards as an IOG fellow, including the Olson award for best paper and the Hankin-Goodman Scholarship in Health Economics.
Spring 2022
Faculty
Top Honors for Scholarship & Mentoring
Dr. Mark Luborsky was elected into Wayne State's Academy of Scholars and also received the Outstanding Graduate Mentor Award. He is a professor of gerontology and a professor of anthropology at WSU. The Academy is an august group with only the top five percent of university faculty offered membership. The Mentor Award recognizes Dr. Luborsky's ability to advise, support, sponsor and inspire graduate students and is determined by faculty and graduate student nominations.
Dr. Luborsky's program of research is strong. He has received decades of funding from several National Institutes of Health agencies to investigate issues including HIV infection in Rwanda; the impact of toxic industrial chemicals on the people who fish the Detroit river; and finding meaning, function and life course reorganization after physical disability. This is the second time Dr. Luborsky has won the Outstanding Mentor Award.
Article on Poland's Older Adults Wins Two Awards
Dr. Jessica Robbins observes older Poles being treated for memory loss in her article, "Expanding Personhood beyond Remembered Selves: The Sociality of Memory at an Alzheimer's Center in Poland." The article won the Aquila Polonica Prize as the best English-language article of the previous two years on an aspect of Polish studies.
The article also won the Polish Memory Studies Award for best article. The international panel of judges, including many Polish scholars, praised the work as "an innovative and interdisciplinary treatment of the connections between individual and social memory . . ." The article appeared in the 2019 issue of Medical Anthropology Quarterly. Dr. Robbins also published her first book, "Aging Nationally in Contemporary Poland," in December 2020.
Excellence in Teaching and Mentoring
Within two short months, Dr. Ana Daugherty earned WSU awards both for her outstanding teaching and mentoring. She won the 2021 College of Liberal Arts & Science's Teaching award as a faculty member who has had a broad positive impact on students. In February, she won a Post-Doctoral Mentoring Award for her success in creating a vibrant, meaningful professional development and mentoring program for the IOG's post-doctoral students.
IOG faculty Dr. Noa Ofen said the award was extremely well-deserved. "It is wonderful to see that your outstanding commitment to the success of our postdoctoral students is being widely recognized. We are all so fortunate to have you as a mentor and a colleague." Considering Dr. Daugherty talents with students, it's no surprise she also co-authored a well-received article in the December issue of Inside Higher Ed on "Creating a Compassionate Classroom."
Students
IOG Fellow Awarded Federal Grant
Dr. Kelsey Canada, a postdoctoral fellow in the Ofen Lab of Cognitive and Brain Development, won a $211,000 grant from the National Institute of Child and Human Development. Dr. Canada will analyze data from across the U.S. to look at the effects of adverse socioeconomic disparity on the development and size of select areas in the brain's hippocampus.
IOG Fellow Excels among Tough Competition
Dr. Lingfei Tang received a Wayne State University Posdoctoral Research Award for 2022. Only 14 postdoctoral students received the award from across the entire campus. Dr. Tang, a postdoctoral scholar mentored by Dr. Noa Ofen, focuses on lifespan cognitive and developmental neuroscience. He is examining changes in the brain's structure and function that support development of memory in children and young adults.
IOG Students win Top Honors in WSU's Psychology Department
Roya Homayouni received the 2022 Julie A. Thomas Memorial Scholarship Award for excellence and promise in the scholarship of graduate students in Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience.
Allison Moll was recognized for her excellence in teaching with the 2022 Graduate Student Teaching Award for Lectures.
Hypertension Work Wins Prize
IOG trainee Allison Moll took home third place in the psychology department's graduate student fall competition for her, "Are Clinician- and Self-reports of Hypertension related to Cognition in Late-life?"
The Travel is On Us
The IOG gave monetary awards to pre-doc trainees Qin Yin and Youjin Jung to cover travel costs to present at upcoming conferences. Yin will present at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting in San Francisco. Jung will travel to the Alzheimer's International Conference in San Diego. Both students research cognitive neuroscience.
Optimizing Ph.D. Student Performance
Rumble Fellowships are coveted stipend-based awards to support students with high potential for extraordinary achievement. Two top IOG doctoral trainees received Rumble Fellowships for fall 2022: Allison Moll, majoring in clinical psychology, and Roya Homayouni in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience.
Alumni
Book on Racism Wins Scholarly Achievement Award
Tacit Racism, by Dr. Waverly Duck, won the North Central Sociological Association's Scholarly Achievement award for 2022. Selected from a large pool of nominated works, the book was honored at the society's national conference in early April. Dr. Duck was an IOG trainee for five years before leaving for a post-doctoral associate position at Yale University. Today he is a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Tacit Racism, co-authored with Anne Rawls (2020), is his second book and confronts unconscious racism.
Spring 2021 Awards & Honors
Two IOG Pre-Docs are Neitzel Summer Fellowship Winners
Roya Homayouni and Qin Yin, both IOG pre-docs working in cognitive neuroscience, have were awarded the Neitzel Summer Fellowship to support their 2021 summer research.
NCCU Honors former IOG Trainee for Excellence in Teaching
LaShawn Wordlaw, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Department of Public Health Education, who deploys multiple forms of technology when engaging with students. "I enjoy learning new approaches to teaching," Wordlaw said. Her classes are filled with recorded lectures, video clips, student presentations and discussions about current events. Soon, she plans to add small-group work to her online courses using case studies. "I think small-group work will be helpful as students benefit from peer-to-peer experiences," she said.
Fall 2020 Awards & Honors
Promotions:
Dr. Jeske Damoiseaux promoted to associate professor with tenure in the Department of Psychology in August.
Dr. Wassim Tarraf earned a promotion to associate professor with tenure in the Department of Health Care Sciences in August.
Lichtenberg wins ABPP Award
Peter Lichtenberg, Ph.D., ABPP, director of the Institute of Gerontology at Wayne State University, has won the 2020 Specialty Board Award in Geropsychology from the American Board of Professional Psychology (ABPP). ABPP is the country's primary organization for specialty board certification in psychology, promoting quality services through professional examination and certification. Lichtenberg became one of the country's first board-certified clinical geropsychologists in 2012.
IOG pre-doc trainee Roya Houmani won the Blue Cross Blue Shield Foundation Award 2020-21
Spring 2019 Awards & Honors
Acclaim for a Bright Future
DeAnnah Byrd, Ph.D., won the James Zimmer New Investigator Research Award for 2018 from the American Public Health Association. This award recognizes past excellence and the promise of future excellence in research and leadership in new investiga- tors within five years of completing their Ph.D. Dr. Byrd submitted her manuscript Black-White Cognitive Trajectories: What Ages Do Differences Emerge? She is a postdoctoral scholar in Wayne State's Postdoc to Faculty Transition program.
The Spirit of Our IOG Community
IOG Outreach Director Donna MacDonald is a finalist in Wayne State's annual Spirit of Community award ceremony. Her high quality outreach programs have grown exponentially to educate more than 10,000 older adults and professionals every year. Donna em- bodies this engagement with the metro Detroit community that Wayne State values. She insures that every touchpoint we have with a local resident is informed, respectful, helpful and honest. The winner will be announced at the April ceremony.
Most Downloaded of the Year
Cognitive neuroscience researcher Ana Daugherty, Ph.D., is first author on an article in the journal Hippocampus cited as one of the most downloaded in 2018. The paper explains the ongoing work of a large international collaboration of more than 200 scientists from 15 countries to create methods of measuring subfields of the hip- pocampus through MRI. The work impacts memory development, aging and pathologies like Alzheimer's disease. IOG faculty mem- bers Naftali Raz, Ph.D. and Noa Ofen, Ph.D., are co-authors.
Travel on Us
Pre-doctoral trainees Caitlin Cassady, Lingfei Tang, Chaitali Anand and Qijing Yu won monetary awards to help cover their travel to March conferences to present research. Caitlin heads to Portland for the Society for Applied Anthropology meeting to pres- ent: Educating for Activism and Relevance: Learning through Anthropology and Social Work. Lingfei flies to San Francisco for the Cognitive Neuroscience Society meeting. He will discuss the reliability of functional MRI measures in characterizing memory development in children and adults. Chaitali will attend the same conference to discuss age differences in the hippocampus that affect learning and memory. Qijing visits the Society for Research in Child Develop- ment in Baltimore to talk about the role of the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in young children. Congrats to all.
2019 Lifespan Alliance Research Day Awards
IOG - Best 3- Minute Thesis Competition (TIE), Chaitali Anand for Aging to Alzheimer's: The Search for Biomarkers- Chaitali Anand
and Evan Gross for Financial Decision-Making Self-Efficacy and Cognitive Decline
IOG - Best Podium Presentation
Rebecca Campbell - Self-reported Sensory Impairment is Related to Better Memory Performance
IOG - Best Poster Presentation
John Lynn - T1 Mapping for the Characterization of the Cortex throughout the Lifespan, A Tie for Winner of the 2016 Olson Memorial Award for Best Paper in Gerontology
Congratulations to pre-docs, Nasim Ferdows and Qijing Yu. The selection committee judged these papers to be in a dead heat for first place for this award. Both submissions were equally strong, well written, and have important and intriguing findings. Both winners will receive $500 as part of this award. Below are the titles and abstracts of their submissions.
Again, congratulations to both Nasim and Qijing on this impressive achievement!
Healthy Aging after Age 65: A Life Span Health Production Function Approach
Abstract: This paper examines the determinants of healthy aging using Grossman's framework of a health production function. Healthy aging is produced using a variety of inputs, determined in early life, young adulthood, mid-life and later-life. A healthy aging production function is estimated using nationally representative data from the 2010 Health and Retirement Study on n=9,478 non-institutionalized seniors. Using a simultaneous equations mediation model we quantify how childhood factors contribute to healthy aging, both directly and indirectly through their effects on mediating adult outcomes. We find that favorable childhood conditions significantly improve healthy aging scores, both directly and indirectly, mediated through education, income, and wealth. We also find that good health habits have positive effects on healthy aging that are larger in magnitude than the effects of childhood factors. Our findings suggest that exercising, maintaining a proper weight, and not smoking can more than compensate for unfavorable conditions experienced as a child.
Socioeconomic Status Linked to Differences in Hippocampal Volume in Childhood
Abstract: The development of the hippocampus is affected by environmental factors that can be captured by an individual's socioeconomic status (SES). It is unclear, however, whether the relation between SES and hippocampal volume is stable across age. We investigated the relation between hippocampal volume, estimated by rigorous manual demarcation with high reliability, and SES in children (N=31, 8-12 years-old) and young adults (N=32, 18-25 years-old). There was a positive relation between hippocampal volume and SES in the group of children, but not in the adults. Bigger hippocampal volume was also associated with better memory, suggesting that the SES-related hippocampal volume may contribute to individual differences in memory.