Students, Faculty, and Alumni Making an Impact
Stay connected with updates from the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience.
Faculty News
Distinguished Teaching Professor Elizabeth Cooper received a 2025-2026 Athletics Professor of Excellence Award. Each year only six faculty on campus receive the honor, funded by UT Athletics, in recognition of their professional excellence and outstanding university citizenship.
Professor Michael Olson, along with Florida State University Associate Professor David March (PhD ’19), developed software for studying unconscious processing by presenting separate stimuli to each eye, using a technique called continuous flash suppression (CFS). Until now, presenting stimuli subliminally could be done only for very brief exposures, or researchers would have to use elaborate multi-monitor and mirror setups to present different stimuli to each eye. Olson and March’s free software, CFS-VR, allows for greater exposure times for unconscious stimuli using a simple virtual reality headset. They hope their software makes the study of unconscious processing accessible to more researchers.
Student Research
The first paper from the UT Department of Psychology and Neuroscience that used machine learning and artificial intelligence to measure opioid-induced anxiety-like behavior in mice was published in the Journal of Neurophysiology in 2025. Education and research go together, and this unique publication happened thanks to years of effort by five UT students, each of whom earned authorship on this landmark paper. The clinical relevance of this opioid research will be published in Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine 8th Edition, 2026.
Opioids provide pain relief but disrupt sleep. Poor sleep worsens pain, increasing the need for pain relief, resulting in a perpetuating cycle. Recently published research in The Journal of Phamacology and Experimental Therapeutics showed that in mice, opioids do not relieve pain without causing sleep disruption, highlighting the need for treatments that diminish pain without disrupting sleep. Of the four student authors, one completed their PhD, one former undergraduate is a PhD candidate in the Bredesen Center’s data science and engineering program, another will complete their MA this year, and another is a PhD student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The research will be featured in Basic Neurochemistry, 9th Edition (in press 2026).
Alumni Honors
Zac Giffen (’13) joined the department’s Alumni Advisory Board. He is a member of the Volunteer 40 Under 40 Class of 2026, an award that recognizes alumni who have been excelling personally and professionally since completing their degree at UT.
Tracy Henley (BA ’85, PhD ’89) has been named a Texas A&M University System Regents Professor. The highest faculty honor bestowed by the Texas A&M Board of Regents, the award recognizes Henley’s leadership in teaching, research, and service. During his time at UT, Henley worked with Professors Howard Pollio and Cheryl Travis.