School of Psychology Professor Randall W. Engle has been honored by the Association for Psychological Science (APS) with the William James Fellow Award for his lifetime of significant contributions to the field of psychology. APS is the largest international organization representing scientific psychology.
“I am honored to receive this award from APS,” says Engle. “For over 40 years, I have been interested in individual differences in our ability to focus and maintain attention while performing complex tasks. Georgia Tech has given me the opportunity to work with incredibly bright, hard-working, and inquisitive students over my career. This award really belongs to them.”
“I am thrilled to congratulate Randy on receiving the William James Fellow Award, one of the highest honors in our field,” says Tansu Celikel, chair and professor of the School of Psychology. “This award is a testament to his groundbreaking research on attention and cognitive control, as well as his profound impact on generations of students and scholars. His contributions continue to shape our understanding of the mind, and we are immensely proud of his achievements.”
Engle’s research explores the nature of our ability to focus and maintain attention in the face of distractions, both external (“what a pretty butterfly!”) and internal (“I wonder what my friend is doing now?”). His work has been influential across a wide array of areas — including social psychology, emotion, psychopathology, developmental psychology, and psychological testing — and has contributed to modern theory of cognitive and emotional control.
Randall Engle received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from Ohio State University and joined Georgia Tech in 1995 as chair of the School of Psychology. In 2008, he stepped down from that role in order to establish the Georgia State University/Georgia Tech Center for Advanced Brain Imaging (CABI), serving as the center’s director for four years. Engle was editor of Current Directions in Psychological Science for over 10 years and has been on the editorial board of many other journals.
He has received numerous awards throughout his career and is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Association of Psychological Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Society of Experimental Psychology, the Memory Disorders Research Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Learn more about his research group here: englelab.gatech.edu
About the Association for Psychological Science
The Association for Psychological Science (previously the American Psychological Society) is the premier international organization dedicated to advancing scientific psychology and its representation as a science. Founded in 1988, it is the scientific home of thousands of leading psychological science researchers, practitioners, teachers, and students from around the world and spanning the entire spectrum of scientific, applied, and teaching specialties.
About Georgia Tech
The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is one of the top public research universities in the U.S., developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition. The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its more than 47,000 undergraduate and graduate students represent 54 U.S. states and territories and more than 143 countries. They study at the main campus in Atlanta, at instructional sites around the world, or through distance and online learning. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.
Lindsay C. Vidal
Assistant Director of Communications