SfN 2025 Report: JUNE and FUN Faculty Awards

JUNE Awards

JUNE offered a number of awards to acknowledge and thank authors, board members, and reviewers who make the journal robust. Implementing DOIs has allowed us to trace views, and so we’re incorporating that knowledge into our collection of paper of the yr. One factor that’s placing about

this knowledge is {that a} paper doesn’t should be new to realize a readership. Two current papers (2024) have been repeated on the high of the month-to-month summaries, and the editor and reviewers agreed that these have been glorious contributions to the journal. These are:

Memphis NeuroSTART Program: Promoting Student Success and Increasing the Diversity of Applicants to Neuroscience Graduate Programs

By Helen J.Okay. Sable & Deranda B. Lester

Using BioRender for Active Learning: Exploring Learning-Style Preference and Visual-Spatial Ability in Undergraduate Students

By Jessica Ha, Deena Afana, Keon Nassimi Moghaddam, Andrea Nicholas

We wish to thank the editorial employees that has been instrumental in paper evaluate and the method of shifting the journal to a brand new format and web site. We are nonetheless in the midst of the method, and we thank everybody in your help and persistence. The Fall JUNE concern would be the first printed on the brand new web site.

Reviewer of the Year is Ian Harrington, Professor at Augustana College. Ian has been on the editorial board for a very long time and has led a number of initiatives, together with Amazing Papers and Project Divine. He at all times says sure! And has been supportive of all the efforts to enhance the journal over time. During the final yr, Ian has been a really energetic reviewer, particularly with the superb paper sequence, which is a vital contribution to educating with the first literature.

FUN Faculty Awards for 2025

Each yr, FUN opens a name for nominations to acknowledge excellent contributions to undergraduate training in neuroscience. These awards are offered to FUN members who’ve exhibited distinctive educating or analysis in an undergraduate setting, who’ve offered elementary service to advancing the mission and values of FUN, and who’ve demonstrated achievements in these areas over sustained intervals of time. Nominations are solicited and reviewed by the Awards committee, which this yr consisted of Yuan Yuan Kang (Past President); Jackie Rose (President); Lauren Williamson (Councilor); Thomas Newpher (FUN member) and Tari Tan (FUN member).

CAROL ANN PAUL EDUCATOR OF THE YEAR: This yr’s award recipient is Dr. Maureen Rutherford, an Associate Professor in Psychology at Indiana University Northwest (IUN). She can be the Psychology Department Chair and an Associate Director of FACET (Faculty Academy on Excellence in Teaching) at IUN. A winner of the 2022 Indiana University Northwest Founder’s Day Teaching Award, Dr. Rutherford is acknowledged for her improvements in neuroscience training and help to the Psychology college students at her establishment, as the school advisor for the Psi Chi Honor Society, and for the Psychology and Brain Sciences Club. Her notable pedagogical efforts included growing a neuroscience Course-based Undergraduate Research Experience (CURE) for first-year college students and incorporating service-learning tasks as a part of curriculum and enlargement into neuroscience outreach alternatives. In addition to her neuroscience analysis with zebrafish, Dr. Rutherford has additionally printed in training journals, together with Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science, and Teaching of Psychology.

FUN MENTOR AWARD: This yr’s recipient of the FUN Mentor Award is Dr. David Jewett, a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience on the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. Dr. Jewett is chosen for this award primarily based on his in depth report of supporting trainees in any respect profession levels, starting from undergraduate college students to early profession neuroscience college. Dr. Jewett’s analysis group consists solely of undergraduates (usually 10 – 15+ members). He has mentored greater than 250 undergraduates in analysis, with most of them having offered their work at regional and nationwide conferences and lots of of them persevering with to PhD graduate coaching and research-related careers. Dr. Jewett has additionally mentored college students within the MARC (minority entry to analysis careers) packages and thru the Ronald E McNair program that helps gifted low-income, first-generation college students. Dr. Jewett helps and has co-hosted the Midbrains regional undergraduate neuroscience convention. Beyond undergraduate college students, Dr. Jewett helps curriculum for and personally mentors trainees throughout the profession spectrum of their scientific growth. A notable instance is the event of the FUN Mentoring Network, an in-person program to help college who interact undergraduates in neuroscience school rooms and laboratories in any respect ranges, and in a range of careers and establishments.

FUN SERVICE AWARD: This yr’s service award goes to Dr. Elaine Reynolds for her extraordinary management in stewarding JUNE by way of its modernization and restructuring course of because the Editor-in-Chief. In her three-year time period (2022-2025), Elaine formalized the operational process of JUNE and restructured our copyediting employees and editorial board. With Bill Grisham, she tirelessly assigned tons of extra digital object identifiers (DOIs) to JUNE articles and guaranteed that these have been listed in PubMed. Above all, Dr. Reynolds oversaw key modifications to modernize and advocate for JUNE because the flagship FUN journal. Specifically, Dr. Reynolds researched and recognized Scholastica as the brand new platform for internet hosting JUNE, which included shifting JUNE operations to Scholastica, whereas working with all stakeholders to make sure its easy transition, all of which have taken many hours, emotional labor, and technical troubleshooting. In the tip, these modifications can have a long-term optimistic impression on our journal, whether or not in giving legitimacy within the eyes of many different scientists or in making certain sustainability and constant help for the journal.

CAREER AND LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD: Dr. Elaine Reynolds, Professor in Biology and Neuroscience at Lafayette College, is the recipient of this yr’s Career and Lifetime Achievement Award, for displaying steady look after the undergraduate neuroscience neighborhood and its development towards progressive objectives for the previous 25 years. During this time, Dr. Reynolds mentored 71 convention shows and printed 17 analysis articles with undergraduate neuroscience college students. As the founding member, President, and Vice President for her regional chapter of the Society for Neuroscience, Dr. Reynolds gained a number of educating and mentoring awards, together with the 2016 Carol Anne Paul Educator of the Year Award and three separate awards from Lafayette College in 2002, 2016, and 2018. An extended-time FUN member, Dr. Reynolds has served on the Executive Board, as President, and Past President between the years of 1999-2004, persevering with her service on the JUNE editorial board since 2015, and ultimately taking on the function of Editor-in-Chief in 2022. As Editor-in-Chief of JUNE, Elaine has promoted important reflection, tradition change towards elevated inclusion and social justice, and mental debate on the impression of a altering technological panorama for undergraduate neuroscience. These priorities are mirrored in her contributions to the 2023 FUN Pedagogical Workshop Committee and publication within the JUNE workshop concern. Most lately, she has spearheaded the meeting of an Oxford Handbook of Undergraduate Neuroscience Education, issued a name to motion urging the undergraduate neuroscience neighborhood to reinvest in public engagement, and put her personal recommendation on this matter into follow by way of her long-standing outreach actions together with her native senior neighborhood.

NEUROSCIENCE CHAMPION AWARD: Dr. Mays Imad is a Professor in Biology at Connecticut College. Dr. Imad promotes a perspective of deep humanism and acknowledges the human expertise and value of each particular person as a major situation for studying. In flip, Dr. Imad has introduced this humanistic perspective to critique the buildings of educational insurance policies and institutional practices relating to STEM tradition. An instance of this work might be present in an article she printed titled “Recasting the agreements to re-humanize STEM education,” which appeared in a particular concern in Frontiers in Education underneath the theme “Centering Humanism in STEM Education”. As this yr’s Neuroscience Champion Award recipient, Dr. Imad was not solely chosen primarily based on her physique of labor in inclusive excellence, but in addition for bringing these concepts to the undergraduate neuroscience neighborhood and to the good thing about a broad vary of STEM educators and their college students. Notably, Dr. Imad’s trauma-informed pedagogy delivered on the 2020 Summer Virtual Meeting served because the supply of inspiration for FUN college together with her inimitable emotional authenticity in a second of profound disaster and social disconnection. At the 2023 FUN workshop at Western Washington University, she delivered a hands-on workshop on “recasting the agreement to re-humanize STEM education” and additional prolonged its mental attain to a broader vary of training practitioners and researchers by way of an open panel she organized on the 2023 assembly of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in Honolulu, Hawaii. In 2025, Dr. Imad co-organized a panel on the Society for Social Studies of Science, in Seattle, WA on the theme “Representation, Reclamation, and Epistemological Boundaries in Scientific Narratives”. As acknowledged in her nomination letter, Dr. Imad is “a Neuroscience Champion because she uses her prodigious talents to understand the structural phenomena (economical, political, and social features of systems) that constrain our actions, encourage us to connect with our own deepest moral intentions, connect those intentions to our capacity to act, and build our capacity to act collectively through building our connections with one another.”