Psychology and Our Curious World

About Charity Brown GriffinGary W. LewandowskiThomas HeinzenWind Goodfriend

Dr. Wind Goodfriend has been named Faculty of the Year three times in her 19 years as a professor at Buena Vista University. This distinction is the result of an all-student vote and her General Psychology course was chosen as the Most Recommended individual class in the entire university by the BVU newspaper. She has also won the Wythe Award one of the largest collegiate teaching prizes in the nation. She has written over a dozen book chapters about psychology in pop culture four textbooks for Sage three Audible audiobooks about psychology dozens of peer-reviewed journal articles and has published over 30 journal articles featuring her undergraduate students as the first author. She also wrote and starred in a docuseries about the psychology of cult manipulation for The Great Courses. Wind won the 2023 Undergraduate Teaching & Mentoring Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Dr. Gary W. Lewandowski Jr. started college right after high school and loved it so much he never left. As a professor at Monmouth University he has published over 70 academic books/articles/chapters and given over 120 conference presentations (most with student coauthors). He is a nationally recognized teacher who the Princeton Review counted as its Best 300 Professors from an initial list of 42000. He has won teaching awards everywhere he has taught. He has given a TEDx talk Break-ups Dont Have to Leave You Broken which has over 2.6 million views and has written over 150 articles for mass media outlets that have been enjoyed by over 8 million readers. He has also written a research methods textbook and authored Stronger Than You Think: The 10 Blind Spots That Undermine Your Relationship . . . and How to See Past Them.   Dr. Charity Brown Griffin has a passion for teaching first-generation and racially marginalized undergraduate students as an Associate Professor of Psychological Sciences at Winston-Salem State University (WSSU) a historically Black university. She also engages in practice work as a Nationally Certified School Psychologist (NCSP) and Licensed Psychologist and serves as a content consultant for numerous childrens media programming. During her tenure at WSSU she has received numerous awards and honors including the Bill Sheppard Master Teacher Award the Wilveria B. Atkinson Distinguished Research Award and student choice Advisor of the Year award for her mentorship of Psychology Club. Her research focused on schooling experiences and positive youth development has received over 2.2 million dollars in grant funding has resulted in over 30 peer-reviewed publications and over 50 conference presentations and has been featured in popular media and news outlets such as Successful Black Parenting Magazine CNN and PBS Kids.  Dr. Thomas Heinzen at William Paterson University of New Jersey is proudest that he has mentored more than 60 student presentations and published research. He has been a keynote speaker at a variety of teaching-related conferences including NITOP Rocky Mountain Teaching of Psychology and the Association for Psychological Science about his book on Clever Hans and facilitated communication. He has been elected as a fellow to the Eastern Psychological Association to the Association for Psychological Science and to Division 1 of the American Psychological Association. He has also been an invited speaker at several technology conferences to discuss how to apply principles of game design to social problems such as improving rates of college completion. Students have honored him with a variety of awards that range from being the winning lab in an egg-tossing contest to numerous recognitions from the Psychology Club.