The John Richard Binford Memorial Award

The John Richard Binford Memorial Award honors a former chairman of the Department of Psychology. This award recognizes a doctoral degree recipient who excels in scholarship and has contributed to other areas within the discipline such as leadership, teaching or service.

Samuel Thomas Vielee is enrolled in the Pharmacology and Toxicology Ph.D. program under the mentorship of Dr. Johnny Wise. Mr. Vielee graduated with honors on a pre-medical track at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, AL, receiving his B.S. in biology with two minors: one in psychology and one in global & cultural perspectives. His hometown is Indianapolis, IN. 

Mr. Vielee has been passionately dedicated to his role in the NeuroWise Laboratory of Environmental Toxicology, which he joined a mere 3 months after Dr. Wise began a faculty position. He has maintained a steadfast, ambitious approach to generating data, training and mentoring students, presenting his work to local, national, and international audiences, maintaining a high level of rigor, and formulating new experiments or hypotheses to follow on generated data. He published his first first-author manuscript with the completion of his MS, a review paper published in Brain Sciences, and since then has published 4 first-author publications on primary data he generated during his PhD candidacy. He further co-authored two other publications, has four more first-author publications on primary data in preparation, and seven more co-author publications in preparation. He has given 9 seminar presentations during his PhD candidacy, earning first place for his PhD platform presentation at the Ohio Valley chapter meeting of the Society of Toxicology (OVSOT) in fall 2024. He earned a first-place Graduate Student Research Award from the Society of Toxicology Metals Specialty Section in 2025 and a first-place award for his three-minute Big Picture Science talk at OVSOT in 2022. He received numerous travel awards to attend national and international conferences to present his work, and earned a prestigious Graduate Intern Fellowship Training (GIFT) Award from the Society of Toxicology in 2023. In the lab, Mr. Vielee has mentored five undergraduate students and three high school students, as well as trained three medical students in laboratory techniques; these students have earned a total of seven awards under his mentorship. He has also taken on several leadership roles, including the Graduate Student Representative for OVSOT, Executive Committee Member on the UofL Science Policy Outreach Group, Co-Director of the Louisville Science Pathways Program and serves on the SOT Professional Development Subcommittee. Finally, he has served his community beyond the lab or University by serving as a judge for 3 local middle/high school science fairs.

From UofL, he will begin a postdoctoral fellowship in marine biomedical research with the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, FL. There, he will develop new research projects assessing mechanisms of marine peptide neurotoxicity, evaluating animal venom as a therapy for neurodegenerative diseases, and investigating aging pathways in marine animals.