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.
These awards - and the individuals they support - are funded by the SfNC Awards Fund.
We welcome charitable donations to this fund.
SfNC Young Investigator Award
This award is given annually 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.
SfNC Dissertation Award
This award is given annually to recognize an outstanding dissertation(s) in creativity research, broadly defined.
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 aspired to be a professor and teach the next generation of psychologists in Creative and Cognitive Psychology. In her memory, this award is given annually to a student recipient or recipients who are interested in creativity research and who have overcome obstacles and/or demonstrated resilience.
Congratulations to our 2026 SfNC Award Winners!
SfNC Young Investigator Award
Boris Forthmann
University of Münster, Germany
Dr. Boris Forthmann is a psychologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Münster in Germany. He studied Psychology at Münster and completed his doctorate there on the assessment of creative thinking. In his current role, he teaches methods and statistics and conducts research at the interface of psychological measurement and creativity research.
Boris' research focuses on creativity assessment—especially creative thinking—and extends to scientometrics, where he examines scientific productivity and related indicators using quantitative, measurement-oriented approaches. Across this work, he is interested in formative assessment and in improving how complex constructs are operationalized, scored, and interpreted. He serves as Co-Editor in Chief for Thinking Skills and Creativity and Associate Editor for the Creativity Research Journal.
Ioanna Zioga
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece
Dr. Ioanna Zioga is a postdoctoral researcher supported by a Bodossaki Foundation Postdoctoral Scholarship. She received her PhD from Queen Mary University of London (QMUL), where she investigated the link between learning and creativity using behavioral, EEG, and computational methods. Following her doctoral work, she continued her research at QMUL on two-person brain synchronization and subsequently led a four-year postdoctoral project at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in the Netherlands, where she used MEG to study brain oscillatory dynamics during language comprehension and production. As she transitions to an independent research leader, Dr. Zioga is establishing a new research hub in Greece focused on the neurocognitive mechanisms of musical creativity and performer-listener interaction. This work will be further advanced through her upcoming Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Dr. Zioga’s research examines the neurocognitive mechanisms of creative thinking, focusing on how the brain generates novel ideas beyond well-established associations. She combines electrophysiological methods (EEG/MEG) with computational approaches, showing that alpha and beta brain oscillations support key domain-general processes, such as inhibitory control and the reactivation of representations, respectively. A central focus of her work is creative intention, namely how explicit instructions to “be creative” influence performance. Her findings show that such goal-directed states alter patterns of brain activity and interhemispheric communication, facilitating access to more remote and less typical ideas. Beyond controlled laboratory tasks, Dr. Zioga studies creativity in more naturalistic settings, including language production and musical improvisation. Her research in music has identified a “sweet spot” for creativity, where intermediate levels of grammatical structure lead to the most creative output. She has also shown that sensitivity to statistical regularities during learning predicts later creative performance. Her ongoing work explores how creative intention shapes the alignment between performer and listener in live music settings, highlighting creativity as a mechanism for transforming musical information into a shared emotional experience.
SfNC Dissertation Award
Sarah Moreno-Rodriguez
Paris Brain Institute ICM, France
Dr. Sarah Moreno-Rodriguez earned an engineering degree in biology from AgroParisTech and a M.S. in cognitive science from the Ecole Normale Supérieure Ulm before achieving a Ph.D. in cognitive and computational neuroscience at the Paris Brain Institute, under the mentorship of Dr. Emmanuelle Volle and Dr. Alizée Lopez-Persem.
Sarah's PhD work advances a value-based model of creative thinking, directly addressing longstanding gaps in our understanding of idea evaluation and selection. By integrating creativity and decision-making frameworks, she demonstrated that individuals systematically assign subjective values to candidate ideas, and that these values guide idea selection and ultimately shape creative performance. At the neural level, Sarah showed that these processes rely on the brain’s valuation system (the human analogue of the reward system identified in animal studies), thereby providing neural support for the widely recognized but previously undercharacterized role of motivation in creativity. She further revealed new roles for the Default Mode Network and the Executive Control Network, showing that they respectively monitor the originality and adequacy of ideas during idea evaluation. This provides an empirical and neural validation of the consensual definition of creativity, demonstrating that originality and adequacy are not merely experimenter-imposed criteria but dimensions actively monitored during creative thinking. Finally, through a controlled and pre-registered cognitive intervention, Sarah showed that enhancing value-based processes leads to measurable improvements in creative performance, opening promising avenues for applications in education, management, and clinical contexts.
Simon Ceh
University of Graz, Austria
Dr. Simon Ceh is a psychologist and postdoctoral researcher at the University of Graz, Austria, we he studied Psychology and Applied Ethics, and completed his doctoral studies under mentorship of Dr. Mathias Benedek.
Simon’s work as doctoral researcher started with the use of EEG, fMRI, and eye-tracking to better understand attentional mechanisms related to creative thinking. For his PhD thesis, he focused more strongly on the study of creative behaviors in digital contexts, applying quantitative text analysis approaches like topic modeling on in-the-wild data sources like social media platforms. His work illustrates not only the broad impact of the digital transformation on creativity but additionally showcases how digital environments have become accessible via novel measurement approaches, enabling the study of creativity at scale beyond the lab.
Sarah A. Burgess Award
Tuval Raz
Technion, Israel
Tuval Raz is a PhD candidate at the faculty of Data and Decision Sciences at the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology, his research centers on the role of question-asking in creativity, divergent thinking, and problem-solving as well as academic success and AI. Outside of academia he enjoys hiking as well as sailing, and is in fact a licensed skipper.
His research focuses on the cognitive mechanisms of question-asking and its profound impact on creativity, problem-solving, and academic achievement. He investigates how the complexity of questions serves as a primer for creative thinking and effective inquiry across various developmental stages and contexts. His work also utilizes large language models and automated scoring systems to assess open-ended question complexity. Through both experimental studies and comprehensive reviews, his research explores how knowledge reshapes inquiry.
Haley Forest is a doctoral candidate in the Leadership Psychology PsyD program at William James College, concentrating in the Neuroscience of Leadership. With a background spanning two decades in hospitality and culinary arts, with pivots through product development and business consulting, she brings a richly interdisciplinary perspective to behavioral science and organizational psychology.
Her research examines how activating distinct brain networks through different patterns of attention and focus influences the kinds of creative ideas people generate. The work investigates whether deliberate shifts between goal-directed focus and undirected attention produce ideas that are both more novel and more useful than sustained focus alone, with practical implications for innovation, and creative problem-solving in professional settings.
Haley's path to doctoral research has been shaped by unexpected turns and the discovery that resilience isn't just enduring, but finding what you're capable of when the work finally feels like home.