Graduate and Postdoctoral Representatives’ Report
Grant Edmonds and Michael Boudreaux
Greetings from your Graduate Student and Post doc representatives! As your new representatives, we’d first like to introduce ourselves:
Grant Edmonds
I completed my graduate work at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where I worked with Brent Roberts. My main research interests are in personality change and development across the lifespan, and pathways linking personality and physical health. After finishing grad school, I was very fortunate to be taken on as a post doctoral research associate at the Oregon Research Institute working with Sarah Hampson and Lew Goldberg. ORI is a non-profit research center run largely on federal grants. We have a democratic governance system, which contributes to making this a unique and rewarding place to do research. Recently, I was promoted to the position of associate scientist at ORI. While I am no longer a postdoc, I am happy to continue serving my term as the ARP postdoc representative. For those of you nearing the end of your graduate training, soft money organizations like ORI sometimes represent an overlooked part of the job market. Anyone with questions about the life of a soft money researcher should feel free to contact me.
Michael Boudreaux
I am a fifth-year Ph.D. candidate at the University of California, Riverside working with Dr. Daniel Ozer. My research examines the negative implications of maladaptive personality traits (e.g., social inhibition, self- sacrifice) for self and interpersonal functioning. My dissertation work focuses on identifying personality-related problems associated with the five-factor model and categorizing the behavioral dimensions that define these problems. Based on this research, I plan to develop a measure of impaired personality functioning. Upon graduation, I hope to secure a post doc to further strengthen my quantitative and methodological skills in measure development. As your ARP graduate representative, I would very much like to hear about your ideas for bringing additional social networking and professional development opportunities to the ARP biennial conference. The SPSP Graduate Student Committee has implemented several programs that attract graduate students and post docs alike, such as the new Speed Data-ing event, and some of these may serve as models for future ARP activities. If you attend this or other similar events at the SPSP conference in New Orleans, please take note and feel free to give us your feedback.
One thing we love about ARP is that it is still a small organization. As a result, young researchers attending the biennial conference often have many opportunities to interact with some of the best minds in the field. A great example of this was the mentoring lunch for grad students and postdocs organized by our predecessors, Jennifer Fayard and Erik Noftle, at the last meeting in Riverside . There were three tables, each with a faculty mentor covering a different topic. We received positive feedback from the mentors and mentees alike. For the upcoming ARP conference this summer, we will be organizing something similar and hope to expand this to cover more topics. Currently, we are asking graduate student and postdoc members for your input on the content of the mentoring lunch. What topics do you think would be the most valuable and relevant to your professional development?
We have developed a brief survey, which is linked below:
https://academictrial.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_5yDyHCtHBSoATnT
Alternatively, you can contact either of us via e-mail: Grant Edmonds, at gedmonds[at]ori.org, or Michael Boudreaux, at mboud001[at]ucr.edu.