Scripps College President Nancy Y. Bekavac announced the appointment of Professor Alan Hartley as the first Molly Mason Jones Professor in Psychology at Scripps. Funded by an anonymous donor, this endowed chair is named in honor of Professor Emerita Molly Mason Jones, the second woman in the history of the college to hold a tenured position in psychology at Scripps; the first was Mary B. Eyre, after whom the children’s school is named.
The Jones Professorship is the first endowed chair in the social sciences, other than history, at Scripps College. It recognizes the importance of the discipline of psychology in the educational interests and needs of current and future Scripps students. It is also the first chair to be named in honor of a woman faculty member.
Income from the Jones endowment will support Professor Hartley’s teaching and research activities, as well as special equipment needs or to fund a Scripps student research assistant.
Professor Hartley joined the Scripps College faculty in 1977 and has since taught a wide variety of courses from statistics to neuroscience to “Coming of Age in America” in the Core Humanities Program. He and his students have been actively involved in studying how cognitive functions such as memory, attention, judgment, and problem solving either remain stable or change across the lifespan. His recent honors and awards include five Mary Wig Johnson Faculty Achievement Awards within the past six years for teaching, research, and community service; the Scripps College Sabbatical Research Award in 1994; and the Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst Goethe Institute Scholarship in 1993. He received his bachelor’s degree from Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. from the University of California, Irvine.