Psych prof wins $35,000 grant

Virginia Richards is young and restless. Yesterday, as the National Academy of Sciences announced that Richards won one of two Troland Research Awards -- a prestigious $35,000 research grant awarded to psychologists under 40 -- the professor was still working late hours in the Psychology Lab Building, preparing an application for another grant. Now in her eighth year at the University, Richards is the third Penn Psychology professor to win the 14-year-old award. Edward Pugh won the first-ever Troland, and Martha Farah received the award in 1992. Richards, who won the award for her work in auditory perception, said she "had no idea" she would win the annual award, named for the late Harvard University Professor Leonard Troland. Pugh and Farah both received the award for their work in visual perception. Other Troland winners have worked in speech perception and memory. "It's a very high distinction for young psychologists who are doing this kind of quantitative investigation of the sense," said Pugh, who continues to teach and conduct research in Penn's Psychology department. Through her research, Richards attempts to understand how the auditory system picks out a single sound from the wide array of noise the human ear receives every day. In several studies, subjects in a sound booth were "trained" to pick out a tone from static. Once they could barely detect the tone, "we muck around a bit with the stimulus," Richards said, explaining that she changed the tone's frequency or intensity. She then recorded the effects of those changes on the subjects' ability to hear the sound. Richards also ran computer models of human hearing to compare with the student data. She admitted that there were "not necessarily immediate clinical applications" to her work, but she suggested that her research might eventually play a role in new therapies for the hearing-impaired. Richards double-majored in psychology and mechanical engineering at the University of California at San Diego. She also received a master's degree in applied mathematics from Purdue University in Lafayette, Ind., then returned to the West Coast to earn her doctorate in psychology from UC-Berkeley. "She is a basic scientist whose main motivation is trying to understand how the mind works," Farah said of Richards, describing her as "very low-key, unassuming and totally brilliant." "She inspires great devotion and loyalty among her students," Farah added. "It's a very happy lab. People are there at all hours of the night." Richards also teaches an undergraduate course in perception which deals with the senses of vision and touch, in addition to hearing. "I liked her teaching style," said College sophomore Shoshana Twersky, who took Richards' class. "I thought she did a good job." Jeffrey Schall, a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., also received the Troland this year for his research on selective attention in vision. The NAS began awarding the prize to two psychologists in 1994.