The Vicki Green Psychological Sciences Thesis award provides funding for graduate students in the Department of Psychological Science to assist with expenses to conduct their research. To be eligible for the award the student must have successfully completed their thesis proposal and obtained IRB approval.
This year, the department selected a candidate with a remarkable list of accomplishments and a thesis project of particularly high integrity: Mallory Kroeck. Mallory has a uniquely rich background. Before coming to NAU she led support groups at a refuge for underprivileged women in Ghana, west Africa. During and after this experience abroad, her interactions with clinical psychologists sparked a deep interest in neurofeedback as a treatment for various mental disorders. After spending over a year in training, Mallory became a BCIA board certified neurofeedback technician and she worked with neurofeedback clinics to treat retired NFL players with concussion-related symptoms.
As a second-year graduate student at NAU, Mallory has quite a long list of accomplishments and has deepened her understanding and experience of psychophysiology, and specifically EEG. Mallory has conducted research in two of the department’s psychophysiology laboratories and has learned distinct methods of EEG processing and analysis. For example, Mallory has completed a graduate course to learn methods to batch process raw EEG data by programming in Matlab, EEGlab and ERPLab. She has experience working with EEG data using the event-related potential technique, as well as examining changes in spectral power.
Mallory’s thesis project, chaired by Dr. Larry Stevens, integrates and expands on her already impressive skill set. In simple terms, Mallory’s thesis project examines changes in neural activity over time during the experience of compassion. To do so, she is using eLORETA, a source localization technique, to estimate where in the brain changes in spectral power occur as people respond to the suffering of other people with compassion. Mallory was presented the award on December 7, 2018, at an educational event attended by department faculty and graduate students. The department congratulates Mallory on her remarkable list of accomplishments for receiving the 2018 NAU Department of Psychological Sciences Vicki Green Thesis Award.