Dr. Suzanne Vrshek-Schallhorn is the recipient of a 2014 Career Development Travel Award from the Anxiety and Depression Association of America. This award was also honored at the annual meeting of the Association for Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies, held November 20-23, 2014 in Philadelphia.
Vrshek-Schallhorn earned her Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at the University of Minnesota in 2008, after which she took a position at Northwestern University as a National Research Service Award (NRSA) Postdoctoral Fellow. She joined the Department of Psychology at UNCG as an Assistant Professor in 2013.
Broadly, Dr. Vrshek-Schallhorn’s research program focuses on the identification of new targets for psychosocial and pharmacological prevention and treatment of depression by studying how neurochemical systems interact with life stressors in the etiology of depression. She currently holds a National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Affective Disorders (NARSAD) Young Investigator Grant.
The Career Development Travel Award acknowledges the quality, extent, and multidisciplinary nature of Vrshek-Schallhorn’s early career research. As part of this award, she presented a conference paper entitled, “Does Trait Rumination Enhance Stress Vulnerability? Affective, Neuroendocrine, and Cognitive Responses to Lab-Induced Stress.” The findings of this paper reveal that trait rumination (the extent to which people tend to dwell on the causes and consequences of low mood) predicted greater negative affect, but insufficient cortisol responses, when individuals experienced a lab-based public speaking stressor.
