The Council of Graduate Schools has presented a Distinguished Dissertation Award, the USA's most prestigious honour for doctoral dissertations, to Psychology lecturer Dr Jessica Horst. Jessica completed her doctorate on toddlers' language acquisition abilities at the University of Iowa in 2007. Jessica's dissertation, 'Turning novel names into known names', proposed a theory on how to combine existing knowledge on how humans quickly identify words ('fast mapping') with knowledge about how we learn. Using both lab experiments and computer modelling, she discovered that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the ability to fast map does not mean a toddler has actually learned a new word; full-word learning is a gradual process.
James Williams, Lecturer in Science Education, has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Biology (FIBiol). Fellows are working in senior positions and have shown that they have made a prominent contribution to bioscience; James has been recognised for his work in promoting biological education and for his academic work on creationism and evolution.