Awards

Professor & Chair, Department of Psychology, University of Denver

2026 SANS Inaugural Service Award Recipient

Kateri McRae is a professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Denver. She has spent her career characterizing neural systems that support cognition and emotion. She has identified the principles that govern these neural systems to improve our understanding of effective emotion regulation. More specifically, she has demonstrated how using shifts in interpretation and perspective can improve our emotional well-being, an emotion regulation strategy known as cognitive reappraisal. Reappraisal is a generally effective, self-driven emotion regulation strategy, and is a powerful tool to fuel hope and persistence in the face of an uncontrollable, harmful environment. Her recent research has characterized different types of reappraisal (e.g., reinterpreting the present, focusing on the future, accepting the situation) and teasing apart the generation of alternative appraisals from implementation and elaboration. Dr. McRae considers her research on emotion regulation and emotional well-being as inextricable from what most people consider teaching and service responsibilities. She teaches a first-year seminar called, “Exploring Psychology Through Theater” and has co-authored a forthcoming book on the psychology of acting, The Actor’s Mind. She has been an academic advisor, faculty advising director, DU’s 4D faculty fellow for well-being, and department chair, roles for which knowledge of emotion regulation has been critical. She is obsessed with discerning what we can change, and what we cannot (in the brain, in life). While we can’t control the world, we can control our local environment, invest in communities we care about (like SANS), and offer perspective and interpretation shifts to one another – and she has data to show that can make a real difference.

Department of Radiology, Washington University in St. Louis

2026 Mid-Career Award Winner

Dr. Shuo Wang is an Associate Professor of Radiology, Neurosurgery, and Biomedical Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 2014 and completed postdoctoral training at Caltech and Princeton University in 2017. His research integrates multimodal, advanced measurement techniques with sophisticated computational approaches to elucidate the neural mechanisms and computations underlying face and object processing, visual attention, emotion, and memory. The overarching questions guiding his work focus on how the brain recognizes faces and objects, discerns environmental significance, and translates visual information into memory. He is particularly interested in the neural computations that support these cognitive processes. Using a multimodal approach, he investigates these questions at both the microscopic level—through state-of-the-art human single-neuron recordings—and the macroscopic level, employing fMRI, EEG, and intracranial EEG. These experimental methods are complemented by advanced computational techniques designed to handle complex, large-scale datasets. Dr. Wang and his team have developed novel tools for deep learning–based analysis of neural responses, computational saliency and memory modeling, neural decoding, and automated video analysis. His research also includes characterizing individual differences in cognitive processes, particularly to understand how these processes are disrupted. To this end, he studies brain lesion patients, including rare congenital cases with focal amygdala lesions, as well as individuals with autism, representing extremes in cognitive variation that likely exist along a continuum. His research has been recognized with an NSF CAREER Award, a DoD Young Investigator Award, the Dana Clinical Neuroscience Award, and a Powe Award.