Awards

SANS is pleased to recognize our members with five key awards each year.

SOCIETY AWARDS NOMINATION ARE NOW OPEN 

 2026 SANS Service Award

The Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) is honored to launch a special recognition award.  We invite nominations for the SANS Service Award, honoring individuals whose sustained and exceptional contributions have strengthened both the field of social and affective neuroscience and the SANS community.

This award celebrates those whose leadership, mentorship, and advocacy have advanced the science, broadened participation, and enhanced the infrastructure and visibility of our field.

The recipient will receive complimentary registration to the 2026 conference in San Diego, and a commemorative plaque presented during the conference.

SANS Service Award Nomination Process

  • All nominations will be evaluated by a Committee Co-Chaired by President and Vice President.
  • We invite nominations and self-nominations for this honor.
  • Nominees should demonstrate:
    • A sustained record of service (spanning multiple years) to the field and/or SANS
    • Evidence of impact at the national or international level
    • A commitment to advancing equity, inclusion, and mentorship
  • Be an Active or recent SANS membership or a significant history of engagement with the society
  • Outstanding nominees often demonstrate integration between elevating:
    • The Field of Social and Affective Neuroscience — through efforts that expand scientific infrastructure, foster collaboration, promote education and outreach, advocate for research support, or enhance diversity and inclusion across the discipline.
    • The Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS) — through sustained service that strengthens the society’s mission, supports its members, and promotes community building, mentorship, and engagement.
  • The following materials should be submitted for consideration to :
    • Nomination Letter (500 words maximum) describing the nominee’s contributions and impact on both SANS and the broader field.
    • Curriculum Vitae or Resume highlighting relevant service activities.
    • Up to Two Supporting Letters from individuals familiar with the nominee’s service contributions.  Letters should explicitly address:
      – The duration and scope of the nominee’s service
      – Tangible evidence of impact (e.g., growth, participation, influence, innovation)
      – How the nominee’s efforts have advanced the goals of SANS and the field
  • Submit all nomination materials as a single PDF to:
  • The successful candidate must attend the 2026 conference.  The recipient will be notified prior to the SANS Annual Meeting, where the award will be formally presented with a formal citation and commemorative plaque.
  • Nomination deadline: December 20th, 2025
  • Decision will be announced:  February 17, 2026
    *Current members of the SANS Board of Directors are not eligible for nomination during their term of service.

 2026 Distinguished Scholar Award

The Distinguished Scholar Award recognizes the broad scope and potentially integrative nature of scholarship in social and affective neuroscience. It honors a scholar who has made distinctively valuable research contributions across their career in areas by significantly advancing our understanding of the biological basis of social and affective processes or expanding the core of social and affective neuroscience discipline. The winner of this award will receive a $500 honorarium, complimentary registration to the 2026 conference in San Diego as well as an invitation to be our Distinguished Scholar Speaker at the conference.

Distinguished Scholar Nomination Process

Kevin Ochsner

Kevin Ochsner

Columbia University, Dept of Psychology

2025 Distinguished Scholar Award Winner

Kevin Ochsner is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Psychology at Columbia University, where he directs the Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (SCAN) Lab and co-directs the Center for Brain, Mind and Society, whose mission is using behavioral and brain research to inform our understanding of societal issues. His lab has published more than 170 scientific articles and books, supported by funding from private and public institutions, including five different NIH Institutes.  For this work, Kevin has received various awards including the APA New Investigator Award and the Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society.  Kevin is one of six co-founders of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society and is a past president of the Society for Affective Science.

Past Winners

2024 – Mauricio Delgado

2023 – Matthew Lieberman

2022 – Eveline Crone

2021 – Uta & Chris Frith

2019 – Nancy Kanwisher

2018
– Betsy Murray

2017 – B.J. Casey

2016 – John Cacioppo

2015 – James J. Gross

2014 – Elizabeth Phelps

2013 – Ralph Adolphs

2026 Mid-Career Award

The Mid-Career Award recognizes a mid-stage investigator who has made significant contributions to Social and Affective Neuroscience in terms of outstanding scholarship and service to the field. The winner of the award will receive a $500 honorarium, complimentary registration to the 2026 conference in San Diego, and deliver a short presentation.

Mid Career Award Nomination Process

Catherine Hartley

Catherine Hartley

New York University

2025 Mid-Career Award Winner

Dr. Catherine Hartley is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. She received her B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University and her PhD in Psychology from New York University. Her research focuses on characterizing how dynamic changes in brain circuits from childhood to adulthood influence the learning, memory, and decision-making processes that support goal-directed behavior. In this work, she uses a variety of methodological approaches including neuroimaging, psychophysiology, computational modeling, and ecological momentary assessment. A central goal of her research is to understand the adaptive benefits of how individuals learn and make decisions at different developmental stages, as well as how specific learning and decision-making biases contribute to vulnerability or resilience to psychopathology.

Past Winners

2024 – Luke Chang

 

2026 Early Career Award

The Early Career Award recognizes an early-stage investigator who has made significant contributions to Social and Affective Neuroscience terms of outstanding scholarship and service to the field.  The winner of the award will receive a $500 honorarium and be invited to give a short talk at the SANS 2026 conference in San Diego.

Early Career Award Nomination Process

Mark Thornton

Mark Thornton

Dartmouth College

2025 Early Career Award Winner

Mark Thornton is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. He directs the Social Computation, Representation, and Prediction Laboratory (SCRAP Lab) and is a core faculty member of the Consortium for Interacting Minds. He received his bachelor’s degree in psychology from Princeton University, and his Ph.D. in Psychology from Harvard University. Thornton’s research focuses on understanding how the brain organizes social knowledge and how it uses this knowledge to predict the social world. He studies these topics using a combination of naturalistic and controlled experiments, functional neuroimaging, and computational methods.

Past Winners

2024 – Justin Minue Kim

2023 – Oriel FeldmanHall

2022 – Jon Freeman

2021 – Catherine Hartley

2020 – Emily Falk

2019 – Jamil Zaki

2018 – Leah Somerville

2026 Innovation Award

The SANS Innovation Award recognizes a particular article authored by a SANS member and published in a scholarly outlet that makes a contribution likely to generate the discovery of new hypotheses, new phenomena, or new ways of thinking about the discipline of Social and Affective Neuroscience. The award selection will focus on a contribution’s conceptual innovation and potential to motivate new research and further conceptual investigation.  At least one of the authors must currently be a SANS member in good standing (at the time the selection occurs).

Innovation Award Nominations Process

  • Nominations will be evaluated by a committee led by the Vice President and up to two Directors-at-Large.
  • Applications are due by December 20, 2025.
  • Finalists will be announced to the society prior to the annual meeting. At the beginning of the meeting, an electronic survey listing the finalists will be distributed. The winner will be determined through electronic voting.
  • The award is intended for all authors of the nominated paper but must be accepted at the conference. At least one author — preferably the first author — must be present at the meeting.
  • Current members of the executive committee are ineligible to receive the award. If a member of the award committee is an author on any nominated paper, they will recuse themselves and be replaced with another executive committee member.
  • Nominations include the article and a 200-word statement specifying the nature and impact (or likely impact) of the article’s contribution sent to and include “Innovation Award Nomination” in the subject line
  • Individuals may self-nominate or be nominated by others.
  • Award Nomination Panel also reserves the right to nominate potential recipients for this award.
  • Articles must have been published in 2024 or 2025.
  • At least one of the authors must currently be a SANS member in good standing (at the time the selection occurs).

Note:  it is the Article that wins, not an individual or group

Xiaoxue Gao et al.

2025 Innovation Award Winner

2025 – Xiaoxue Gao et al.  The psychological, computational and neural foundations of indebtedness (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44286-9

Past Winners

2024 – Catalina Camacho et all. Large-scale encoding of emotion concepts becomes increasingly similar between individuals from childhood to adolescence (2023)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41593-023-01358-9

2023Lin, C., Keles, U. & Adolphs, R. Four dimensions characterize attributions from faces using a representative set of English trait words. Nat Commun 12, 5168 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-021-25500-y

2022 – Lockwood, P., Apps, M. & Chang, S.W.C (2020). Is There a ‘Social’ Brain? Implementations and Algorithms. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 24(10), 802-813. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2020.06.011

2021 – Dal Monte, O., Chu, C., Fagan, N.,and Chang, S (2020).  Specialized medial prefrontal–amygdala coordination in other-regarding decision preference.  Nature Neuroscience, 2020 April 23(4): 565-574.

2019 – FeldmanHall, O., Dunsmoor, J. E., Tompary, A., Hunter, L. E., Todorov, A., & Phelps, E. A. (2018). Stimulus generalization as a mechanism for learning to trust. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(7), E1690-E1697.

2018 – Parkinson, C., Kleinbaum, A.M. & Wheatley, T. (2017).  Spontaneous neural encoding of social network position. Nature Human Behavior, 1(5), 0072.

2017 – Lockwood, Patricia L., Apps, M.A.J., Valton, V., Viding, E., Rosier, J.P. (2016). Neurocomputational mechanisms of prosocial learning and links to empathy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 9763-9768.
2017 – Stolier, Ryan M. & Freeman, J.B. Neural pattern similarity reveals the inherent intersection of social categories. Nature Neuroscience, 19, 795-797.

2016 – Jack, Rachael. E., , Garrod, O.G.B., Schyns, P.G. (2014) Dynamic facial expressions of emotion transmit an evolving hierarchy of signals over time. Current Biology, 24, 187-192. 

2015 – Preston, Stephanie D. (2013). The origins of altruism in offspring care. Psychological Bulletin, 139, 1305-1341.

2014 – McKell Carter, R., Bowling, D. L., Reeck, C., & Huettel, S. A. (2012). A distinct role of the temporal-parietal junction in predicting socially guided decisions. Science, 337, 109-111.

2013 – Yarkoni, T., Poldrack, R. A., Nichols, T. E., Van Essen, D. C., & Wager, T. D. (2011). Large-scale automated synthesis of human functional neuroimaging data. Nature Methods, 8, 665-670.