2025 Spence Recipients, clockwise from top left: Juan Del Toro, Chaz Firestone, Ashley Watts, Justin Minue Kim, Julia Leonard, Mark Thornton, Gemma Sharp.
Seven early career scientists are recipients of the 2025 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. These researchers are leading cutting-edge psychological research on a wide array of topics, such as the neurocognitive mechanisms of information processing, children’s persistence behaviors, and the connections between psychopathology and addiction.
First awarded in 2010 and named after APS’s first president, the Spence Award honors creative and promising APS members who embody the future of the field.
The recipients will be honored in May at the 2025 APS Annual Convention in Washington, D.C. Spence Awardees are also automatically conferred status as APS Fellows in the review cycle following their award.
Learn more about the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, including previous recipients, the selection committee, and the nomination process and criteria.
Juan Del Toro
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
PhD 2019, New York University
Del Toro’s research investigates the nature and impact of ethnic and racial discrimination on adolescent development. His work uses an ecological perspective to explore the differential impact of ethnic socialization, defined as the beliefs that teach young people about their ethnic or racial identity. He has approached this research with a broad scope, allowing him to identify previously unexplored factors that can mitigate the impact of racial bias. Del Toro’s ecological approach has led him to investigate how different classes of perpetrators of racial discrimination can have different effects on youth development. He has also published on the impact of disparities in school discipline and suspensions, online discrimination and mental health, and the impact of parent incarceration on offspring well-being.
Juan Del Toro’s faculty profile
Chaz Firestone
Johns Hopkins University
PhD 2017, Yale University
Firestone’s research is focused on the interaction between perception and cognition. He is known for his innovative and creative contributions to human cognition, including investigations on how people represent the fundamental shapes of objects, how people best remember objects of varying visual complexity, and whether people “hear” silence. Firestone’s research has contributed to major shifts in psychological science. For example, his argument that perception cannot be directly influenced by cognition has influenced both theory and experimental methods. Firestone’s work has had broad impacts across cognitive and developmental psychology, artificial intelligence, and philosophy.
Justin Minue Kim
Sungkyunkwan University
PhD 2018, Duke University
Kim’s interdisciplinary work examines the neurocognitive mechanisms of affective information processing and how they impact mental health. A consistent theme within his research program is investigating the multifaceted role of amygdala–prefrontal circuity in shaping human behavior, including emotion regulation, social cognition, anxiety, and depression. Kim’s research has highlighted the role of surprised facial expressions as a powerful tool for understanding the importance of processing ambiguity in shaping behavior. His research integrates multiple fields of psychological science—including cognitive, social, and clinical psychology—with neuroscience and has generated long-reaching impacts across the study of emotion, face perception, learning, social cognition, and mental health.
Justin Minue Kim’s lab website
Meet the 2024 Spence Award recipients.
Julia Leonard
Yale University
PhD 2018, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Leonard’s research has made many important contributions to the study of children’s persistence and motivation, specifically that children carefully calibrate their persistence on the basis of perceived success as specified by social input and their own progress. Her research has highlighted the role that parent language and behaviors play in promoting or diminishing children’s persistence. Her work shows a deep interest in both addressing important theoretical questions and investigating questions that matter for children’s real-world success. Leonard researches topics central to developmental psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience as well as those related to education, social psychology, and health psychology. Her focus on persistence in daily tasks—such as toothbrushing—emphasizes important lessons for helping children consistently engage in behaviors that protect their health.
Julia Leonard’s faculty profile
Gemma Sharp
University of Queensland
PhD 2017, Flinders University
Using a wide range of rigorous methodologies, Sharp’s work has focused primarily on body image and related disorders such as eating disorders and body dysmorphic disorder. She has a reputation as an international pioneer in the field of genital body image, influencing multiple psychology subfields as well as aesthetic medicine, gynecology, urology, and plastic surgery. In addition to her work in psychology, Sharp has a background in biomedical science with specific training in oncology. She has a multidisciplinary portfolio, which includes research in information technology, dietetics, metabolic bariatric surgery, aesthetic medicine, endocrinology, pharmacology, public health, and sexual and reproductive health. Sharp has also led and contributed to policy and health system changes within Australia and internationally.
Mark Thornton
Dartmouth College
PhD 2017, Harvard University
Thornton’s research explores how people predict each other’s behavior. His work draws on theories and methods from a wide array of fields, including social psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology, and computer science. For example, previous work has integrated findings from social psychology with findings from neuroscience to design new ways to predict the dynamics of fluctuating mental states. Thornton has a passion for rigorous quantitative and computational methods. In addition to his research, he has organized workshops on computational methods and written public-facing articles on statistics and data visualization.
Ashley Watts
Vanderbilt University
PhD 2018, Emory University
Watts’ research aims to understand the causes and consequences of psychopathology, with a specific focus on addiction. She draws on methods from a wide array of disciplines, including developmental and adult psychopathology, behavioral and molecular genetics, quantitative modeling, psychometrics, and psychiatric epidemiology. Her critical approach to psychiatric classification challenges conventional frameworks, pushing the field toward more nuanced, theory-driven models. Watts’ long-term goals include developing comprehensive models of disease development that bridge human and animal research, with an eye toward uncovering the underlying biological mechanisms of addiction. By advocating for theory-informed methods, she aims to move the field forward in understanding the development of psychopathology across the lifespan.
Learn more about the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions.
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This article was written by APS Staff from www.psychologicalscience.org
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