International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR)

The Lifetime Achievement Award is ISIR’s highest honor, reserved for individuals who have, over their professional lifetime, substantially advanced the field of intelligence. Different types of contributions will be considered, but they must be sustained and truly advance the field. The award is decided by the The Advisory Board of the International Society for Intelligence Research. An award will not necessarily be made every year.

Conference Awards

2009

Justin Low grew up in West Lafayette, IN. He received his B.S. in Psychology from Brigham Young University in Provo, UT where he first became interested in cognitive measurement. He is presently a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin where, under the direction of Tim Keith, he has investigated the validity of several intelligence tests using confirmatory factor analysis. Justin's current research interests include the use of latent growth modeling to investigate the cognitive development of children and the effects of the rate of childhood cognitive development on outcomes such as behavior and academics.

Sophie von Stumm completed a Bachelor in Psychology at Royal Holloway University of London and subsequently, graduated from a Master’s degree in Individual Differences (with Distinction) at the University of Edinburgh. Sophie is a PhD student at the Goldsmiths University of London since fall 2007, under supervision of Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic; her PhD thesis investigates conceptual and measurement approaches to intelligence-personality associations. Beyond that, Sophie pursues research in collaboration with Ian J. Deary and colleagues that aims to identify psychological predictors of several outcomes at midlife, including status attainment and health, and to disentangle their complex nexus of effects.

von Stumm, S., Chamorro-Premuzic, T., Quiroga, M. A., & Colom, R. (2009). Separating narrow and general variance in intelligence-personality associations. Personality and Individual Differences, 47, 336-341.

von Stumm, S., Macintyre, S., Batty, D. G., Clark, H., & Deary, I. J. (2009). Intelligence, social class of origin, childhood behavior disturbance and education as predictors of status attainment in midlife: The Aberdeen Children of the 1950s study. Intelligence, in press.

2008

Matt grew up in Olean, NY. He left Western New York for the blue skies of North Carolina where he ended up working as a school psychologist for two years. In 2003, he entered graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. At Texas he worked under the mentorship of Tim Keith who introduced him to latent variable modeling. He soon realized the important role that quantitative methods would play in his being able to answer, as well as to ask with more clarity, his research questions. Therefore, he decided to pursue a dual specialization in quantitative methods and school psychology. He graduated in August of 2008 with a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology (School Psychology and Quantitative Methods). He has accepted a faculty position in the Psychology and Research in Education Department at the University of Kansas.

He will be teaching in the School Psychology Program. He plans on continuing his research in using latent variable modeling techniques to understand sex differences in human cognitive abilities, phenomenon such as Spearman’s law of diminishing returns, and how broad and specific abilities, beyond g, influence children’s learning.

Joni Lakin is a doctoral candidate in Educational Psychology at the University of Iowa. For the past four years, she has worked with Dr. David Lohman on the Cognitive Abilities Test. She received her B.S. in Applied Psychology at Georgia Tech working with Drs. Phillip L. Ackerman and Ruth Kanfer on knowledge and skill acquisition in adults. Her current research interests include the construction and validation of measures of abilities and other aptitudes for learning, with a particular interest in the participation of women in STEM careers.

Lohman D.F., & Lakin, J.M. Consistencies in sex differences on the Cognitive Abilities Test across countries, grades, test forms, and cohorts. British Journal of Educational Psychology (in press).

Lohman, D. F., Korb, K. A., & Lakin, J.M. (2008). Identifying Academically Gifted English Language Learners using Nonverbal Tests: A Comparison of the Raven, NNAT, and CogAT. Gifted Child Quarterly, 52, 275-296.

2007

Dylan Molenaar studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam. Due to his mathematical orientation he got interested in statistical models to describe human behavior. Therefore, he specialized in methodology and psychometrics at the Department of Psychological Methods, where he completed his Master’s thesis on modeling of ability distributions. In May 2007, he received a personal grant from the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research for his PhD project entitled "Statistical modeling of (cognitive) ability differentiation". He will be working on this project for four years under the supervision of Conor Dolan.

2006

Elliot M. Tucker-Drob is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology, and a member of the Salthouse Cognitive Aging Lab, at the University of Virginia. He is also a National Institute on Aging trainee in quantitative modeling and a graduate fellow of the International Max Planck Research School: LIFE. Elliot’s research interests are concerned with the development and decline of cognitive abilities across the lifespan. He is particularly interested in mechanisms, processes, and constructs that may be involved in, or help to mitigate, the cognitive deficits associated with advancing adult age.

Cris Rabaglia received her bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science from the University of Virginia in 2005. She has been a member of the Salthouse Cognitive Aging Lab since her second year at UVA. In order to further pursue some research questions she had begun to investigate during her undergraduate work, she decided to stay on working as research coordinator of the Cognitive Aging Lab for another year before applying to graduate school. Her research interests include language use, individual differences in language use, changes in linguistic ability across the lifespan, and the relationship between language and other cognitive abilities. She plans to enter a doctoral program in the fall of 2007 to pursue a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology.

Jeffrey E. Pink is a first-year cognitive psychology Ph.D. student at the University of Virginia, under the advisement of Timothy Salthouse. He received his B.S. in psychology from Michigan State University, where he did research with Zach Hambrick assessing the joint contributions of cognitive abilities and non-abilities in individual differences in knowledge acquisition. Jeff’s current research interests concern age-related effects on various aspects of cognition, including working memory and fluid abilities.

Greg grew up in Columbus, Ohio and received his undergraduate degree from Case Western Reserve University, majoring in psychology and philosophy. He stayed at Case, working as a research assistant with the Western Reserve Twin Project, until entering graduate school in 2005. He is currently a PhD student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN, where he works primarily with the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY). His research interests include the relationships between creativity, cognitive abilities, and personality, talent development, and evolutionary psychology.

2005

Nicole Harlaar is a PhD student at the Institute of Psychiatry, London, UK. She is interested in the nature and mechanisms that mediate genetic and environmental risk factors for cognitive and learning disabilities and in trying to piece together how these processes change through the school years. Currently, she is examining these issues in a population-based longitudinal study of twin children in the UK Twins Early Development Study (TEDS).

Representative Publications:
Harlaar, N., Butcher, L. Butcher, L., Meaburn, E., Craig, I. W., & Plomin, R. (2005). A behavioural genomic analysis of DNA markers associated with general cognitive ability in 7-year-olds. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 46, 1097-1107.

Harlaar, N., Dale, P. S., & Plomin, R. (2005). Telephone testing and teacher assessment of reading skills in 7-year-olds: II. Strong genetic overlap. Scientific Studies of Reading, 9, 197-218.

Harlaar, N., Dale, P. S., & Plomin, R. (2005). Correspondence between telephone testing and teacher assessments of reading in 7-year-olds: II. Strong genetic overlap in a sample of 2660 twin pairs. Reading & Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 18, 401-423.

As an undergraduate student at the Psychology Department of the University of Amsterdam, Jelte Wicherts was interested in so many psychological topics that he decided to specialize in none of these topics and focus on research methodology and psychometrics instead. This enabled him to develop a broad view on psychology, which remains with him to this day. Under the supervision of Don Mellenbergh and Harrie Vorst, Jelte wrote his Master's thesis on the equivalence of mood and personality questionnaires across different administration methods. After receiving his Master of Science degree (cum laude), Jelte started a PhD project at the Psychological Methods group of the University of Amsterdam. This project, supervised by Conor V. Dolan, is aimed at applying structural equation models to intelligence test performance. A particular aim of this project is to more fully understand the nature, causes and implications of the Flynn Effect, or the secular increase in intelligence test scores over the years. Furthermore, Jelte's research interests include the effects of stereotype threat on test performance, structural equation modeling, the understanding of group differences in test scores (measurement invariance), and the relation between experimental and differential psychology. Currently he is a student member of the International Society for Intelligence Research (ISIR), the Interuniversity Graduate School of Psychometrics and Sociometrics (IOPS), and of the Psychometric Society. He has supervised several undergraduate research groups and has taught undergraduate courses in research methods, structural equation modeling, and academic writing. In the summer of 2006 he hopes to complete his doctoral dissertation.

Representative Publications:
Wicherts, J.M., Dolan, C.V., & Hessen, D.J. (2005). Stereotype threat and group differences in test performance: A question of measurement invariance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89.

Wicherts, J.M. (2005). Stereotype threat research and the assumptions underlying analysis of covariance. American Psychologist, 60, 267-269.

Wicherts, J.M., Dolan, C.V., Hessen, D.J., Oosterveld, P. Baal, G.C.M. van, Boomsma, D.I., & Span, M.M. (2004) Are intelligence tests measurement invariant over time? Investigating the nature of the Flynn effect. Intelligence, 32, 509-537.

2004

Wendy Johnson grew up in Tacoma, Washington, the eldest of three daughters of a civil engineer and psychologist/special education teacher. She graduated from Occidental College in Los Angeles, California, with a degree in mathematics. She spent several years as a commercial insurance underwriter and consulting pension actuary in San Francisco and Los Angeles, and then settled down as a consulting casualty actuary for Coopers and Lybrand in San Francisco. She married Glenn Evans in 1989, and they had a daughter and son. With Glenn, she founded Pacific Actuarial Consultants in 1991, and they maintained this actuarial practice together until 2001. In 1995, however, Wendy began to study psychology at San Francisco State University, and obtained a Master's Degree in Developmental Psychology there in 1999. She entered the doctoral program in the Psychology Department at the University of Minnesota in 2000, and completed her degree there in 2005. She pursues research involving the structure and nature of general intelligence and special mental abilities, personality structure and development, antecedents of individual and sex differences in academic achievement, antecedents of later-life health and psychological well-being, and contributions of cognitive ability to later-life outcomes, with particular emphasis on understanding the underlying transactions between genetic and environmental influences.

Representative Publications:
Johnson, W. & Bouchard, T. J. (2005). The structure of human intelligence: It is verbal, perceptual, and image rotation (VPR), not fluid and crystallized. Intelligence, 33, 393-436.

Johnson, W., Bouchard, T. J., Krueger, R. F., McGue, M., & Gottesman, I. I. (2004). Just one g: Consistent results from three test batteries. Intelligence, 32, 95-107.

Wondering how to be considered for a conference award? Please see the current conference announcement for information on eligibility, and to check out other opportunities available to graduate and postdoctoral students!

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