CLAS names Psychology Professor Jodie Plumert as Starch Faculty Fellow

Friday, April 10, 2015

Jodie PlumertThe University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) has named Jodie Plumert, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology, a Starch Faculty Fellow. Starch fellowships are five-year, renewable appointments, awarded to outstanding faculty in the college who conduct research primarily in psychological and human behavior problems in the field of communication.

"Professor Plumert is an extraordinary mentor to students at all levels, and an innovative and productive researcher," said CLAS Dean Chaden Djalali. "I am delighted to appoint her as a Starch Faculty Fellow in recognition of her outstanding service to our college, the University of Iowa, and her discipline."

Plumert received her B.A. in psychology from Kalamazoo College in 1985 and her Ph.D. from the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota in 1990. She joined the University of Iowa faculty in 1990. Her research focuses on the development of spatial memory and communication and on the role of immature perceptual, motor, and cognitive skills in unintentional childhood injuries. Plumert is a co-leader of the Hank Virtual Environments Lab, which uses virtual environment technology to safely and systematically study perception-action problems with real-world consequences; and the Perceiving, Acting, and Thinking Lab, which studies how children and adults perceive, act, and think in the context of everyday problems such as crossing busy roads and finding missing objects.

The Starch Faculty Fellow awards are named for Daniel Starch, who earned a doctoral degree in psychology from the University of Iowa in 1906 under the direction of Carl Seashore, and went on to become a pioneer of marketing and consumer research. Starch is best known for devising a procedure for measuring the readership of advertisements known as the Starch Recognition Procedure. He was inducted into the UI School of Journalism & Mass Communication Hall of Fame in 1955. The fellowships in his name were made possible by an estate gift left to the University of Iowa Foundation.

The University of Iowa College of Liberal Arts and Sciences offers about 70 majors across the humanities; fine, performing and literary arts; natural and mathematical sciences; social and behavioral sciences; and communication disciplines. About 15,000 undergraduate and nearly 2,000 graduate students study each year in the college’s 37 departments, led by faculty at the forefront of teaching and research in their disciplines. The college teaches all Iowa undergraduates through the college's general education program, CLAS CORE. About 80 percent of all Iowa undergraduates begin their academic journey in CLAS. The college confers about 60 percent of the university's bachelor's degrees each academic year.