I much appreciate this opportunity to connect again this year with members of the extended Washington University Psychological & Brain Sciences community. I am happy to report that the department is doing well, despite the challenges that 2025 has brought. This year, we welcomed four new faculty to the department: Rebecca Cox, Ellen Fitzsimmons-Craft, Derek Isaacowitz, and Joshua Oltmanns. This brings our faculty to 35—but only for a moment, because at the end of this year we will lose Kathleen McDermott, Roddy Roediger, and Michael Strube to retirement.  Our community also includes 16 postdoctoral fellows, 79 PhD students, 15 staff, and 41 research staff. Whether you are a student taking classes, a professor teaching them, or research scientist working in the lab, this is a fun and exciting place to be, with a brown bag or colloquium talk happening almost every day—sometimes more than one—scientific visitors coming and going, and vibrant conversations in the halls.   

  As you no doubt know, this is a challenging and scary time for science, health, and education—our three core missions. Faculty and trainees in the department have been directly affected by cuts to programs at the NIH and NSF, by troubling policy changes, and by the uncertainty of a federal context that is rapidly changing and rapidly degrading. These developments will carve permanent scars in science and higher education.  Our colleague Ian Bogost has recently written powerfully about what this will do to our children’s education. If you have a minute to reach out to your elected officials in support of science, health, and education, I urge you to do so.   

 Despite these headwinds, on many days most of what I get to think about is the amazing work being done by my colleagues here. The department continues to do great science and to publish it in the best venues and, despite the challenges, we are continuing to secure funding to support our mission. This work has been recognized our peers, whose ratings of the department raised us to the rank of #8 in the latest US News rankings. One particular experience that boosts my spirits weekly during the Fall semester is the one-hour seminar on research ethics that I hold each year with the incoming PhD class. Hearing the creative, empirically grounded, and highly informed approach they take to address challenging issues leaves me hopeful for the future. As I write this, we are in the process of recruiting another PhD class from another astonishing pool of applicants. We are also going full throttle on faculty hiring, aiming to recruit four new faculty members. None of us know what next year will bring, but we have no intention of backing off on research, teaching, or the development of our amazing graduate students and postdocs.    

  Another thing that raises my optimism is the flagship events we have held in the last few months. In February, we held the second annual Robert L. Williams lecture, honoring our late colleague. We were honored to welcome Professor Sherman James, who is the Susan B. King Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Public Policy at Duke University and an alumnus of our PhD program. Professor James spoke on “The Psychology of Struggle and Hope: John Henryism and the Health of Black Americans.” In March, we held the inaugural Mark S. Gold Lecture in Translational Neuroscience. More about the lectureship and about the talk given by Professor Sir Robin Murray is in a separate article. The next week, we hosted a second exciting Lifespan Development Summit, organized by Patrick Hill and Emily Willroth. And just this month Ian Dobbins and the Department hosted the Society of Experimental Psychologists, a highly distinguished selective society founded in 1904. (Fun fact: Our department has more members in the Society than any other.)   

On a personal note, these days there is an additional feature of campus life that boosts my mood about our future: I often catch a glimpse of my two kids, because they are both Washington University undergraduates. Neither has darkened the door of our department, but both are doing majors in the Economics department with microeconomic/decision-theoretic/behavioral economic angles. (Which is totally not psychology. No way ;).) We’ll be celebrating Jonah’s graduation next month along with that of our P&BS majors and graduate students.   

  If you haven’t been back to St. Louis in a minute, I hope you will find an excuse to do so—and if you do, stop in and see us. If you can’t get here in person, shoot me an email. I am looking forward to learning more about what the larger Psychological & Brain Sciences community is up to.   

Jeff

Jeffrey M. Zacks, PhD

Edgar James Swift Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences

Chair of Psychological & Brain Sciences

Professor of Radiology

Director, Dynamic Cognition Laboratory