Dr. Kailey Lawson, assistant professor of psychology at Rhodes College, has been selected for the SAGE Emerging Scholar Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP). She will be recognized at the annual SPSP meeting to be held in February 2026 in Chicago, IL.
SPSP, in collaboration with SAGE Publications, recognizes outstanding achievements and research by social and personality psychology scholars early in their careers.
Lawson joined the Rhodes faculty in 2023, after receiving a Ph.D. in social-personality psychology with a quantitative emphasis from the University of California, Davis in 2022. She teaches courses in statistics, personality, and adolescent development and serves on the college’s data analytics program committee.
Her research program focuses on the nature, development, and assessment of personality traits and the influence of these traits on mental health and academic achievement.
Previously, Lawson received both the Heritage Dissertation Award and Student Publication Award from SPSP. She also is the recipient of the Emerging Scholar Award from the Association for Research in Personality.
She has published more than 20 peer-reviewed articles and serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and Personality and Social Psychology Review. In 2024, she was elected to the executive committee of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science.