A professor driven to empower others, Dr. Shana Southard-Dobbs has been named the 2023-24 Distinguished Professor at Lander University.
Southard-Dobbs said the award is a nice affirmation she is on the right track, especially since the award is decided by a committee of previous recipients.
Southard-Dobbs teaches and researches psychology at Lander – a field that was perhaps a natural fit for her before she even knew about it.
She recalls a high school physics class where her teacher asked his students to list characteristics of their classmates. The assignment was meant to illicit physical attributes, but Southard-Dobbs understood it differently and turned in an assignment where she listed personality traits of her classmates.
Southard-Dobbs is a first-generation college student and knew growing up she wanted to be in a helping profession and knew she wanted a prestigious career.
“As an academically-minded kid from a working-class background, that was important to me,” she recalls.
“I grew up in a small town in Arkansas, and they taught the basics well and I did well in school, but I didn't have a lot of exposure beyond core subjects. A lot of my students come in having already taken a psychology class in high school, and I didn't get to do that. So in high school I thought I wanted to be a medical doctor. That was all I could envision where I could help people and have a prestigious career.”
She began college as a biology major, but then took her first psychology class and, in her words, “totally fell in love with it.”
She realized she is a scientist, and thinks like a scientist, but is a behavioral scientist. In college, though, she still had that goal of being a helper and ended up going into counseling, which wasn’t for her but did lead her to professions in higher education.
“I loved working with college students,” she said.
“They're in such a cool developmental stage, both personally and professionally. And that was when I realized I wanted to be a professor. I love working with this group of people. And I want to be in the classroom.”
Lander is a good fit for her, she said. Her work is focused on undergrads and the size of the university allows her to get to know her students and for them to get to know her.
“My colleagues are wonderful,” she added.
“That's usually one of the first things I say about what I like about working at Lander: excellent colleagues who really support each other and work well together. So Lander is a lovely place to have ended up in academia and I feel very fortunate.”
Southard-Dobbs’ research in psychology focuses on memory and how people think about, remember, and interpret stressful, traumatic or important life experiences.
She said this is a topic she has never lost her curiosity about. It blends her natural curiosity with her clinical background and is a good fit for doing research with Lander students, since many are aspiring clinicians.
Epidemiological studies indicate that almost the entire population will, at some point in their lifetime, experience something that would be labeled as trauma, Southard-Dobbs said. Yet, post-traumatic stress disorder diagnoses are surprisingly low, with rates in the general population under 10%. Her research is focused on looking at why that discrepancy exists.
“I think that something we really need to try to understand is these thought processes, how people interpret, tell the story and make sense of — think about — that experience,” she said.
The gold-standard of research in psychology is an experiment, but Southard-Dobbs said psychologists are never going to do a study where they assign some participants to experience trauma and others not to and then study what happens. Currently she does a lot of survey-based research, which can be messy from a measurement standpoint because memory is imperfect.
Southard-Dobbs said she enjoys these research challenges. Though the subject matter she and her student researchers study is heavy, being able to model for her students curiosity and excitement about the scientific process brings her joy. Seeing their excitement be ignited and helping them refine their skills and develop tools to do their own research is fun, too.
“That’s something I feel really lucky that I get to do,” she said.
Working with a team of student researchers, her lab is a place where a lot of intensive mentorship happens and a place for students to learn their strengths and find their goals.
This fall, Southard-Dobbs will have her biggest research team ever, partly because of a President’s Grant she received.
Southard-Dobbs also teaches a course where she covers the basics of memory and how it’s applied, followed by a more in-depth instruction on autobiographical memory.
“That’s so much of who we are: how we understand ourselves, our own conception of our identity, our shared memory in our families and our communities — that is all grounded in memory,” she said. “So it has a lot of applications, if you understand how it works.”
Learning about memory, she said, includes a bit of “blowing up your worldview and view of yourself.”
Students will often have a moment where they fully comprehend and appreciate the complexity of memory and think “What is even real?” and Southard-Dobbs will walk them through those feelings.
Southard-Dobbs believes that aside from shaping the understanding of our own identity, there are consequential systems in society that have been set up, like the criminal justice system, that rely heavily on memory.
“I feel a sense of responsibility to help people know more about that, to have a fuller understanding so that they can make informed decisions about how they interact as an individual and as a community member,” she said.
Along with teaching, one way that Southard-Dobbs has been able to help others understand the psychology of memory was by being a presenter in Lander’s Community Lecture Series earlier this year.
Another important aspect of Southard-Dobbs’ work at Lander is her work as a Faculty Fellow with the University’s Center for Faculty Excellence.
Her guiding principle is empowering others in their learning or in their work, and with colleagues, that includes being empowered in their teaching practice. In working with the Center, Southard-Dobbs has been able to develop programming and workshops.