Congratulations to our 2025 Professional Award Recipients

WPA Outstanding Teaching Award 

& WPA Distinguished Service Award

LYNETTE H. BIKOS

Lynette H. Bikos, Dean of the School of Graduate Psychology at Pacific University Oregon has been a devoted member serving WPA for more than 10 years. Her scholarly work has focused on teaching statistics and research methods to doctoral student in Clinical and I/O Psychology, and she is a Fellow of APA divisions 17 (Counseling Psychology) and 52 (International Psychology) as well as WPA. Her service to WPA consists of serving on the Council of Representatives from 2012 to 2019, as well as being a peer reviewer for conference submissions from 2012 to 2018. Her most notable contribution to WPA, however, has been her service as organizer and coordinator of the Continuing Education (CE) program for WPA’s annual conferences since 2014. This is a difficult and time-consuming task that involves registering up to 60 registrants and awarding 200 to 300 CE certificates each year. Finally, Dr. Bikos has coordinated the student poster contest at the joint APA Division 52 (International Psychology)/WPA International/Global topics conference for 10 years. 

It is for this reasons that WPA proudly awards Dr. Lynette H. Bikos the 2025 WPA Distinguished Service Award.

Lynette H. Bikos, PhD, ABPP, is the newly appointed Dean of the School of Graduate Psychology at Pacific University Oregon. Dr. Bikos spent nearly two decades at Seattle Pacific University, teaching research methods, statistics, and psychometrics to doctoral students in Clinical and Industrial/Organizational Psychology. Long before the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. Bikos flipped her classes by providing screencast lectures and then class time for quizzing, coaching, and live grading. In 2018, she led a school-wide transition from SPSS to R. Dr. Bikos is the author of the open educational resource, ReCentering Psych Stats, which provides statistics/research methods training that is socially responsive.

 

WPA Lifetime Achievement Award 

DACHER KELTNER

Dacher Keltner, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, has made major contributions to the fields of awe, compassion, beauty, power, social class, and social inequality with over 200 publications. He has authored or co-authored multiple books: Born To Be Good (2009), The Compassion Instinct (2010), The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence (2016), Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life (2023), and Social Psychology. In addition, Keltner was a consultant on the Pixar movies Inside Out and Inside Out 2. Keltner founded and is Director of the Greater Good Science Center, which produces The Science of Happiness podcast (hosted by Keltner) and publishes the Greater Good magazine. Finally, he received many awards, including the WPA Early Career Research Award in 2002 and the WPA Social Responsibility Award in 2015.

 

WPA Early Career Research Award 

ISABEL ALMEIDA

Dr. Isabel F. Almeida is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicano/Latino Studies at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). She earned her B.A. in psychology from the University of California, Riverside, and her Ph.D. in Health Psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles. Before beginning her faculty appointment, she was a Chancellor’s ADVANCE Postdoctoral Fellow at UCI. Dr. Almeida investigates how psychological, biological, and sociocultural influence perinatal health among Latinas living in the US. She seeks to understand how cultural factors influence prenatal emotional health among Latinas and the physiological pathways linking emotional health to birth outcomes and offspring health. Dr. Almeida uses qualitative and quantitative methods to address theory-driven research questions that span various areas of psychology and other disciplines, including the social sciences,
public health, and medicine.