Pelham Selected as Education Research Mentor

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- William E. Pelham, Jr., Ph.D., of Amherst, professor of psychology, pediatrics and psychiatry, and director of the Center for Children and Families at the University at Buffalo, has been selected to be a mentor for a new postdoctoral fellowship training program aimed at boosting research on the application of psychological science to education.

Pelham is one of 13 academic leaders participating as mentors in the American Psychological Association/Institute of Education Sciences Postdoctoral Education Research Training program (APA/IES PERT). The program is made possible by a $2,070,573 grant to the APA's Education Directorate from the IES, part of the U.S. Department of Education.

APA/IES PERT is designed to increase scholarly research in the field of education through the application of psychological science to preK-12 education. It will address a critical need in the field, according to Grover J. Whitehurst, IES director.

"We need to foster a new generation of education researchers who are well-trained and capable of conducting scientifically rigorous and educationally relevant studies," Whitehurst says. "Supporting these mentor/fellow pairings is an important step in growing our professional field."

Unlike other programs in the field that offer fellowships directly to students or institutional grants to universities, the PERT program independently solicits applications from mentors and students, and employs a matching process that is overseen by an independent advisory board.

In addition to being engaged in research training, all fellows will participate in a series of joint activities focused on translating research into practice, learning about large-scale research, understanding the education-policy arena, building a community of APA/IES scholars and developing interest in education sciences throughout the graduate-education pipeline in psychology.

A UB faculty member since 1996, Pelham is one of the leading researchers in attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the U.S.

In addition to directing UB's ADHD program, he conducts a highly successful behavior-modification summer program at the university for children with ADHD, which has been named by the APA as a Model Program in Service Delivery in Child and Family in Mental Health.

Over the years, Pelham has studied many aspects of ADHD, including the nature of cognitive deficit; peer relationships; diagnosis; pharmacological, psychosocial and combined treatments; motivation and persistence; family factors, such as parental alcohol problems; service delivery, and outcome.

He is a principal investigator on the National Institute of Mental Health Multi-site Treatment Study for ADHD, a clinical trial investigating effective treatments for ADHD, and currently holds 10 other grants from NIMH, National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and several pharmaceutical companies.