2008 Defining Wisdom Grant Competition: Award Announcements

Congratulations to the award winners of the Defining Wisdom grant competition.  Participants were chosen because each showed the promise of a distinctive contribution to wisdom research and the potential to help establish a new and rigorous field of research on the topic of wisdom.  The Project Council was truly impressed by the presentations and discussions at the Defining Wisdom Symposium which recently took place in Chicago.

In addition to project presentations and discussions, each full proposal underwent a two-stage process of peer review (external review & Council review) in which it was rated according to the Defining Wisdom Evaluation Criteria. On August 23^rd, the Council met in closed session to deliberate and choose the few who would receive research funding in this inaugural RFA. 

The University of Chicago and the John Templeton Foundation are pleased to announce the winners of the Defining Wisdom grant competition:

Deborah Coen
Assistant Professor, History
Columbia University, United States
Uncertain Ground: A Historical Tectonics of Wisdom

Melissa Ferguson
Assistant Professor, Psychology
Cornell University, United States
When Archimedes and King Solomon Meet: Wisdom as Intuitive Problem Solving

Judith Gluck
Professor, Psychology
Alpen-Adria-University, Austria
Wisdom and the Life Story: How Life Experiences Foster Wisdom

Jean Gordon
Associate Professor, Communication Sciences and Disorders
University of Iowa, United States
Wisdom in Words: The Relationship between Language Use and the Perception of Wisdom

Jeffrey Green
Assistant Professor, Psychology
Virginia Commonwealth University, United States
Wisdom as Learning from Life Experiences: Affective Forecasting for Benevolent and Selfish Behaviors

Joshua Greene
Assistant Professor, Psychology
Harvard University, United States
The Wisdom of Moral Principles

Ankur Gupta
Lecturer, Computer Science
Butler University, United States
Wisdom Is Compression: Data Compression as a Mathematical Measure of Wisdom 

Ryan Hanley
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Marquette University, United States
Altruism's Wisdom

Matthew Jones
Associate Professor, History
Columbia University, United States
Formalism and Its Discontents: Mathematics and Wisdom in the European Enlightenment

Lauris Kaldjian
Associate Professor, Medicine
University of Iowa, Carver College of Medicine, United States
Wisdom, Ethics, and the Medical Professional

Ute Kunzmann
Professor, Psychology
Leipzig University, Germany
Wisdom-Related Knowledge and Behavior during Social Conflict

Michael Legaspi
Assistant Professor, Theology
Creighton University, United States
Wisdom as Skillful Interpretation: Scriptural Appropriation and the Hermeneutics of Recovery

Heidi Levitt
Associate Professor, Psychology
University of Memphis, United States
Principles Toward the Development of Professional Wisdom

Randall McNeill
Associate Professor, Classics
Lawrence University, United States
The Price of Wisdom: Community and the Individual in Greek and Roman Poetry

Seana Moran
Research Fellow, Stanford Center on Adolescence
Stanford University, United States
All the Wiser: Wisdom from a System Dynamics Perspective

Shabnam Mousavi
Visiting Research Scientist, Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition
Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Germany
Practical Wisdom as Heuristic Processes

Sendhil Mullainathan
Professor, Economics
Harvard University, United States
Wise Choices: The Interaction of Individual and Institutional Wisdom

Eddy Nahmias
Associate Professor, Philosophy, Neuroscience
Georgia State University, United States
Free Will and Wisdom in the Age of the Mind Sciences

John Pfaff
Associate Professor, Law
Fordham University, United States
Incorporating Systematic Sources of Knowledge into the Social Sciences and the Law

Michael Sargent
Associate Professor, Psychology
Bates College, United States
D*A*R*IA: Testing Model of Principled Reasoning

Valerie Tiberius
Associate Professor, Philosophy
University of Minnesota, United States
The Psychological Foundations of Reflective Wisdom

Neil Tsutsui
Assistant Professor, Environmental Science, Policy and Management
University of California Berkeley, United States
The Wisdom of the Ant: The Role of Experience in Sociality and Aggression

Keith Whitaker
Adjunct Asst. Professor, Center on Wealth and Philanthropy
Boston College, United States
Wisdom at Work: An Inquiry into Wealth Counseling as a Form of Practical  Wisdom