The Guy Stevenson Award for Excellence in Graduate Studies

The Guy Stevenson Award for Excellence in Graduate Studies is named in honor of a former dean of the Graduate School and is presented to an outstanding doctoral degree recipient who has demonstrated excellence in both scholarship and leadership within the discipline and has made significant contributions to teaching and/or service. Lauren Girouard-Hallam is the recipient of this year’s Stevenson award and, as such, serves as the Graduate School’s outstanding student, carries our banner for the Hooding and Commencement ceremonies, and delivers the student speech for the Hooding ceremony.

Lauren Girouard-Hallam is graduating with her PhD in Experimental Psychology. Under the mentorship of Dr. Judith Danovitch, she studies how 4- to 12-year-old children use technology, like internet searches and smart speakers, to learn about the world around them. She earned a Master of Science in Experimental Psychology from the University of Louisville in 2021. Before coming to U of L, she earned a Master of Arts in Drama Therapy from New York University and both a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and a Bachelor of Science in Neuroscience from Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina.

Lauren’s work has been published in major journals in her field, including Developmental Psychology and Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Lauren has given talks about her work at conferences for the Cognitive Development Society and Cognitive Science Society. Lauren’s dissertation project received the SECC Dissertation Award from the Society for Research in Child Development and funding from the Association for Psychological Science.

Lauren has served as a Teaching Assistant for the graduate statistics course sequence in Psychology where she played an instrumental role in re-envisioning the course to include open access and diversity centered lab materials, work for which she and her colleague received a Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science commendation. She is a teaching assistant at the University of Michigan for the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research’s summer program in advanced statistics and she currently serves as the chair of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology’s graduate student group.

Lauren has mentored numerous undergraduate students, including supervising a summer research project that resulted in undergraduate student authorship for a journal publication, as well as students with talks and posters presented at the Meeting of the Minds and the Society for Research in Child Development. In her role as the chair of the American Psychological Association’s Science Student Council, Lauren co-led mentorship and networking events that have reached thousands of undergraduate students across the country.

Lauren also actively contributes to science communication initiatives and currently serves as the Editor in Chief of ComSciConversations and is a serial author for CogBites, blogs dedicated to bringing science to the general public.  She brings her science to school children through the programs Letters to a Pre-Scientist and Skype a Scientist, and Lauren is also a co-founder of the R-Ladies Louisville Chapter which promotes inclusion of gender minoritized individuals in data science. She is currently the new outreach coordinator for the Cognitive Science Society.

After graduation, Lauren will begin her role as a National Institute of Child Health and Human Development funded Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Michigan. She plans to launch an interdisciplinary study on children’s ability to recognize errors made by generative artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT under the guidance of her mentorship team.