Scripps College senior Nicole Speer has earned a 1999 National Science Foundation fellowship, which will provide full support for the first three years of her graduate education anywhere she chooses to go. Speer plans to apply the grant this fall at Washington University, where she will pursue a doctorate degree in cognitive/experimental psychology, with training in memory and neuroimaging.
The NSF selected 900 graduate fellowships this year nationwide out of a pool of 4,796 eligible applicants. According to Scripps Professor of Psychology Alan Hartley, the large majority of the fellowships go to students already in graduate school, mostly in the fields of chemistry and physics. "An award to an undergraduate psychology student is a particular distinction," he said.
Speer has worked with Professor Hartley in the Scripps College Adult Development Project for the past three years. With him, she has completed a number of studies that look at how different types of memory change with age. Both last spring and last week, she presented the results of her studies at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society Conference in Washington, D.C. Last summer, she was accepted to the NSF-CNBC summer undergraduate training program, in which she spent 10 weeks learning about functional magnetic resonance imaging and other areas of cognitive neuroscience, as well as working with Professor Walter Schneider at the University of Pittsburgh studying the neural correlates of learning.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Speer will graduate this spring with honors in both Latin and psychology. She adds the NSF fellowship to a long list of awards, which include the American Psychological Association’s 1998 award for the most outstanding undergraduate research project; and, at Scripps, the Lois Langland Psychological Research Award and the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Award for Extraordinary Leadership Contributions.
After completing her graduate education and training, Speer’s goal is to return to academia in a cognitive neuroscience program. "I want to teach and mentor other students—especially women—who have interests in this field," she said.