Several Psychology Department Faculty and Staff received FSU awards at the conclusion of the 2017-2018 academic year.

Jesse Cougle received FSU's Award for Graduate Faculty Mentoring. This award recognizes faculty whose commitment to excellence in graduate education and mentoring have made a significant contribution to the quality of life and professional development of graduate students at FSU. Dr. Cougle's research hopes to improve the understanding and treatment of anxiety and related disorders, problematic anger, and obsessive-compulsive and related disorders. Mentorship of graduate students is his favorite part of his job. The graduate students in his lab are exceptionally bright and hardworking, and they have developed and evaluated computerized treatments for a range of conditions.

Lauren Dimmer received FSU's Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Advising. This award recognizes faculty and staff who have dedicated their time to ensuring that students are provided with the best possible guidance related to course selection and career choices. Lauren earned an MA in English from the University of Louisville and a BA in English from Florida State University. In addition to academic advising, Lauren works as a Program Advisor for the Garnet and Gold Scholar Society, and coordinates professional development opportunities as a taskforce lead for Advising First. She identifies as an "advising nerd" and is passionate about helping students confront both the challenges and the opportunities of their educational journeys.

Sara Hart received FSU's Developing Scholar Award. This award helps identify and honor FSU's future academic leaders. Dr. Hart's ongoing multidisciplinary research efforts integrate theories and methods from developmental psychology, behavioral genetics, and education. Her work is highlighted by the use of advanced methodological techniques. Her research is related to understanding how and why people differ in their cognitive development as it relates to school achievement. In particular, she has mostly focused on identifying sources of individual differences on the development of mathematics and reading ability, with a particular emphasis in understanding predictors of student success.

Pamela K. Keel received FSU's Distinguished Research Professor award in 2018. This award recognizes outstanding research and/or creative activity of current Florida State University faculty at the rank of Full Professor, as indicated by outstanding scholarly productivity and/or creative activity, recognition and honors related to research and/or creative activity, national and international visibility in endeavors that emphasize research and/or creative activity, and evidence that research informs faculty teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate level.

Dr. Keel is Director of the Eating Behaviors Research Clinic in the Department of Psychology at Florida State University. She has received numerous grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for her research on the nosology, biology, epidemiology, and longitudinal course of bulimic syndromes, with over 20 consecutive years of funding. In addition, Dr. Keel developed and serves as co-Principal Investigator and co-Director of the NIMH-funded Integrated Clinical Neuroscience Training Program at Florida State University, which is responsible for providing enhanced training the doctoral students in the clinical and neuroscience programs to conduct research that translates basic science into clinical applications. She has authored over 200 papers and three books on the topic of eating disorders. Within her NIH-funded program of research, Dr. Keel defined and characterized Purging Disorder as a potentially new disorder of eating, and this work has contributed to the inclusion of Purging Disorder as an Otherwise Specified Feeding or Eating Disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders 5th Edition (DSM-5).

Dr. Keel was elected as a Fellow of the Academy for Eating Disorders (AED) in 2006, Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science (APS) in 2013, and Fellow of the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2014. She served as President for the Eating Disorders Research Society in 2009-2010 and President for the Academy for Eating Disorders in 2013-2014, the largest global professional organization in the field. Finally, Dr. Keel was appointed as a standing member of the Adult Psychopathology and Disorders of Aging (APDA) study section for the Center for Scientific Review of NIH for 2013-2019.

Her research has informed her teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate level. She authored a first and second edition of an undergraduate text book on eating disorders which represents an up-to-date, scientifically based review of what is known about the disorders and published by Oxford University Press. She has mentored numerous undergraduate honors theses in Psychology at FSU, all of which resulted in first-author peer-reviewed publications for her students as well as honors and awards for her students. In recognition of Dr. Keel's contributions to mentorship, she received FSU's Honors Thesis Mentor award in 2014. Dr. Keel has served as an advisor to numerous doctoral students, several of whom have received predoctoral fellowships for their dissertation research under her mentorship and have gone on to their own tenure-track faculty positions. Indeed, within the past year, two of Dr. Keel's students, Dr. Lindsay Bodell and Dr. K. Jean Forney, accepted tenure-track assistant professor positions in departments of psychology.