Faculty from Vanderbilt University’s Peabody College of education and human development have been honored with an appointment to a new national education forum and have received awards this summer.
Christopher Loss, assistant professor of public policy and education, has accepted an invitation to serve as a fellow for the Teagle Foundation‘s new National Forum on the Future of the Liberal Arts. The forum is a three-year program designed to identify and prepare a core national group of emerging academic leaders to guide the future of the liberal arts. The group of 30 fellows will meet twice a year beginning in the spring of 2010 in New York City with leading thinkers in higher education, government, media and public policy. The forum’s goal is for fellows to carry these conversations back to their home universities, to policy circles and to the broader society.
Loss specializes in twentieth-century American history with an emphasis on the social, political, and policy history of American higher education. The Teagle Foundation is a philanthropic organization with a focus on engaging students and liberal arts education.
Susan Saegert, professor of human and organizational development, will receive the American Psychological 
Association‘s Committee on Socioeconomic Status 2009 Award for Distinguished Leadership at the association’s annual conference in Toronto, Canada August 6-9. (As announced previously, Stephen N. Elliott will receive the Senior Scientist Award from Division 16 of the American Psychological Association at the conference).
Saegert is director of the Vanderbilt Peabody Center for Community Studies. Her research involves affordable housing, the mortgage crisis, how to improve distressed housing and neighborhoods, women and the environment, crowding, urban stress and the role of housing in health.
David Lubinski, professor of psychology and Vanderbilt Kennedy Center investigator, and Greg Park, Peabody graduate student, each won awards from the Mensa Education and Research Foundation. Lubinski won the MENSA Award for Research Excellence, Senior Investigator, for the 2006 Psychological Science paper, “Tracking exceptional human capital over two decades,” of which he was the lead author.
Park won the MENSA Award for Research Excellence, Junior Investigator, for the 2007 Psychological Science paper, “Contrasting intellectual patterns for creativity in the arts and sciences: Tracking intellectually precocious youth over 25 years,” of which he was the lead author.
The Mensa Education and Research Foundation gives out six awards for research excellence for a scientific article each year, three to senior investigators and three to junior investigators.
For more information about Vanderbilt’s Peabody College, visit http://peabody.vanderbilt.edu.
Media contact: Melanie Moran, (615) 322-NEWS
melanie.moran@vanderbilt.edu