Susan Murray is a third-year graduate student in the clinical psychology doctoral program. She studies eating and weight disorders in Temple University's Eating Disorders Program (TEDp). Under the guidance of Dr. Eunice Chen, this lab has developed and tested a range of psychosocial interventions for eating and weight disorders.

Susan's current research examines the relations between body weight and cognitive functioning. Her background in studying the neural correlates of food reward in animal models has recently transitioned to an interest in understanding the relations between diet, body weight, and cognition as well as the putative mechanisms underlying these relations in humans. She has been published in journals such as Obesity, Behavioural Pharmacology, and Nature Reviews Endocrinology.

Susan's excellence in research led her to receive an honorable mention for the APA Early Graduate Student Research Award. This includes guaranteed acceptance of her poster into the "Cutting edge Research from Emerging Psychological Scientists" Poster Session at the APA Convention and a grant to support travel to the meeting.  In her poster, Susan summarizes her research on memory deficits among overweight participants to better understand which specific aspects of memory (working, episodic, verbal, visuospatial, etc.) show impairment. Susan is also the recipient of a prestigious 3-year Graduate Research Fellowship from the National Science Foundation and she was selected as a winner of a biobehavioral presentation competition this year at the Obesity Society annual conference.

Susan hopes that her research will help move towards a more nuanced characterization of the relations between memory and body weight and that it will enhance our understanding of the brain circuitry involved in these relations.