W.B Pillsbury Prize
Nicole Freitag obtained her Biopsychology, Cognition, & Neuroscience B.S. with Highest Honors, for her thesis titled "Regulation of sleep preparatory behavior by cortical circuits and their modulation in response to sleep loss", under the mentorship of Dr. Ada Eban-Rothschild.
Madalynn Woods obtained her Psychology B.S. with Highest Honors, for his thesis titled "Little People, Big Emotions, and Digital Media: Social Emotional Learning in Children’s YouTube Viewing and Its Impact on Social and Behavioral Competence", under the mentorship of Dr. Jenny Radesky and Dr. Shelly Schreier.
Louis Bernstein Undergraduate Psychology Research Award
Maiya Atzmon is majoring in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience and will be completing an Honors thesis under the mentorship of Dr. Ada Eban-Rothschild, titled “Sound Salience Processing During Sleep”.
Elia Garcia is majoring in Psychology and will be completing an Honors thesis under the mentorship of Dr. Craig Rodriguez-Seijas, titled “Investigating how neurodevelopmental conditions (Autism and ADHD) fit into the HiTOP framework”.
Anne Rudo Memorial Award
Ava Schaefer is majoring in Biology & Spanish and is involved in initiatives through the Ronald McDonald House, is a CNA at Michigan Medicine, and is a Lead Research Assistant for Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) Lab.
Gwendolyn Bulko is majoring in Psychology and volunteers with Wolverine Support Network, Caps in Action, and an ABA clinic.
Martha Muenzer Memorial Awards
Chloe Brookes is majoring in Psychology and will be working on her thesis next year under the mentorship of Dr. Terri Conley, with the goal to adopt a critical lens on how gender roles manifest themselves in minority and queer relationships, tracking the potential outcomes of their adoption. Specifically, Chloe will investigtate how this impacts communication styles and relationship satisfaction.
Abigail Pretty majoring in Psychology and will be working on her thesis next year under the mentorship of Dr. Christopher Monk, with plans to examine how socioeconomic adversity relates to structural differences in reward-related brain regions during adolescence, and how these neural patterns may be associated with subclinical risk for substance use and related psychopathology.
Al and Barbara Cain Living Memorial Award
Alexandra Malikov graduated Winter 2026 with a B.S. in Psychology with Honors.
Thesis: "Juror Instructions in Battered Woman Syndrome Cases"
Mentor: Dr. Richard Gonzalez
Sofia Yaziji graduated Winter 2026 with a B.S. in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience with High Honors.
Thesis: "How Childhood Maltreatment Relates to Somatic Complaints and Multisite Pain in Emerging Adulthood"
Mentors: Dr. Christopher Monk and Dr. Chelsea Kaplan
Tanner Memorial Award
Ruixi Piao is majoring in Biopsychology, Cognition, and Neuroscience and completed a thesis with Honors in Winter 2026.
Thesis: "Visual speech restores degraded spectrotemporal information in the auditory cortex”
Mentor: Dr. David Brang
Lorraine Nadelman Honors Thesis Award in Developmental Psychology
Amela Halkic graduated Winter 2026 with a B.A. in Psychology with Highest Honors.
Thesis: “Enhancing the Reliability and Validity of Externalizing Behavior Measurement: A Longitudinal Multi-Informant Approach”
Mentors: Dr. Luke Hyde and Dr. Katie Paige
Edward Chang Diversity Research Award
Annalise Aponte graduated Winter 2026 with a B.A. in Psychology with Honors.
Thesis: "Exploring the contributions of home and school environments to English language production in Spanish-English bilingual children”
Mentors: Dr. Ioulia Kovelman and Dr. Molly Leachman
