SfNC Awards

SfNC is proud to offer three annual awards for its eligible members to recognize outstanding work in our discipline: the Young Investigator Award, the Dissertation Award, and the Sarah A. Burgess Award.

Winners of these annual awards each receive a cash prize and are invited to present their work at our annual meeting.

The 2025 SfNC Award nomination window will open soon. We encourage all trainees and early-career creativity researchers who are eligible to apply.

SfNC Young Investigator Award

This award is given annually with a small cash stipend to an outstanding creativity scholar who is no more than ten years removed from receiving their PhD degree or from their entry into the field of creativity.

Nomination Requirements:

A current CV
At least one and no more than four articles (preprints or PsyArxiv papers qualify)
A 1-2 page research statement (which should note implications for diversity, equity and inclusivity)
One letter of support from a scholar in the field emailed to rebeaty@psu.edu

SfNC Dissertation Award

This is given annually with a small cash stipend to recognize an outstanding dissertation(s) in creativity research, broadly defined.

Nomination Requirements:

A current CV
A copy of the successfully defended dissertation
A brief cover letter indicating request for consideration for this award

Sarah A. Burgess Award

Sarah A. Burgess (1982-2021) was a young researcher with a passion for creativity and cognition. Sarah was the definition of perseverance as she always survived her worst days to make the most of her best days. She was a talented dog trainer, and loving human to her bearded collies, Storm and Summer. She loved rainy days, walks in nature, geocaching, and being a proud nerd in the areas of psychology, science fiction, The Beatles, My Little Pony, presidential history, and many more. She aspired to be a professor and teach the next generation of psychologists in Creative and Cognitive Psychology. Even though she never led a classroom, she taught and inspired everyone she loved. In her memory, this award is given annually with a small cash stipend to a student recipient or recipients who are interested in this topic (speaking broadly) and who have overcome obstacles and/or demonstrated resilience.

Nomination Requirements:

A current CV
A one-page personal statement
At least one letter of support emailed to rebeaty@psu.edu

These awards - and the individuals they support - are funded by the SfNC Awards Fund. We welcome charitable donations to this fund.

DONATE TO THE SFNC AWARD FUND

Congratulations to the 2024 SfNC Award Winners!

Young Investigator Award: Denis Dumas, PhD (University of Georgia)

Dr. Denis Dumas is Associate Professor of Educational Psychology at the University of Georgia, situated within the program for Gifted and Creative Education as well as the Quantitative Methodology program. Denis holds a PhD in Educational Psychology and an MA in Educational Measurement & Statistics from the University of Maryland, College Park. Denis has received funding from the Institute of Education Sciences, the Naval Research Laboratory, and the National Academy of Education. He is currently an Associate Editor at Thinking Skills and Creativity and has published approximately 80 peer-reviewed articles.

Dr. Dumas’ creativity research began in the development of methods to automatically quantify the originality of participant responses to divergent thinking tasks. In addition, he also designed new tasks and stimuli for prompting divergent thinking, as well as applied those tasks to understanding the creativity in populations ranging from elementary students through professionally creative performing artists. Lately, he has begun to delve more deeply into theoretical descriptions of creativity, and is currently working on the origins of the creative personality, and ways to support creative students in the classroom.

Dissertation Award: Tanushree Agrawal, PhD (UC San Diego)

Tanushree Agrawal recently completed her PhD in Experimental Psychology at the University of California San Diego, and is currently an Asst. Project Scientist and Lecturer at UC San Diego. She has a Masters in music psychology from the University of Oxford, and Bachelors degrees in Cognitive Science and Economics from the University of Pennsylvania. Tanushree recently served as Trainee Representative and co-founder of the Mentorship Committee on the executive board of the Society for Music Perception & Cognition. Her work has been published in journals such as Developmental Science and Open Mind, and has been funded by the Grammy Foundation and the CARTA Institute.

Tanushree’s research uncovers how factors like creativity and aesthetic engagement can strongly impact everyday social reasoning. Her work shows that aesthetically-motivated individuals are judged as higher moral beings who are more wrong to harm and also less likely to harm others; such evaluations are driven by enhanced perceptions of mental traits in those who are creatively-motivated (e.g., their intelligence, emotional sensitivity, and capacity to experience physical sensations like pain or hunger). Her work highlights that the crucial underlying factor is not the creative activity in and of itself (e.g., music or art), but rather, the social information conveyed about an individual who has the capacity to find value in something as abstract and nuanced as creativity or aesthetic beauty.

Dissertation Award: Rachit Dubey, PhD (MIT)

Rachit is a postdoctoral research fellow at MIT Sloan School of Management. Previously, he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Princeton University and a Masters in Education from University of California, Berkeley. His work has been published in journals such as PNAS, Nature Sustainability, Psychological Review among others and been covered in popular outlets such as BBC and MIT Tech Review.

Rachit’s research focuses on understanding intrinsic motivation i.e., the motives that drive us to explore and learn even in the absence external rewards. Specifically, he employs computational modeling and behavioral experiments to better understand when and why different motives help us and when do they become maladaptive and lead us astray. Using this approach, he has provided a normative perspective of curiosity and Aha! moments as well as developed interventions to pique people’s curiosity for everyday scientific topics. He hopes that this work can inform creativity researchers interested in studying how creative solutions arise as well as education researchers interested in motivating people to persist through challenges.

Sarah A. Burgess Award: Lucas Bellaiche (Duke University)

Lucas Bellaiche is a PhD Candidate at Duke University, housed between the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He obtained his MA from Duke in Cognitive Neuroscience, and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and a Bachelor of Science in Statistics from the University of Arkansas.

Lucas is primarily interested in the intersection of creativity and emotion, as measured through interdisciplinary avenues and methodologies. In one line of research, he examines the cognitive consequences of engaging with art, including the emotional benefits (e.g., art therapy; manuscript in prep), aesthetic judgments, and imaginative processes that arise from viewing and producing art. Secondly, he is also interested in the broad role of creativity in emotion regulation: how does flexible thinking benefit us when facing adverse events (manuscript under review)? Studying creativity and emotion, he hopes to elucidate how these two of the most valued expressions of humanity rely on one another, and ultimately, how we rely on them.