An IUPUI psychology doctoral student was honored this month by the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools (MAGS). Miji Um was selected as the MAGS Distinguished Thesis Award winner for 2019 in the Social Sciences area. Um is a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology under the mentorship of Melissa Cyders, Ph.D., associate professor.
As an award winner, Um presented her thesis research at the 75th Annual MAGS Meeting, which was held March 20-22 in St. Louis, Mo. Her presentation was titled “Neural Correlates of Negative Urgency in Tobacco Use.”
During her graduate training at IUPUI, Um has received a competitive F31 predoctoral research training fellowship from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to support her dissertation research. Her dissertation examines the relationship between positive urgency (a tendency to act rashly under extreme positive emotions) and alcohol-related risk-taking using alcohol administration and emotion induction methods as well as complex whole-brain connectomic analyses using resting-state fMRI data.
Um’s career goal is to become an independent academic researcher, investigating the behavioral and neuroscientific evidence underlying emotion-based impulsivity, and leveraging this evidence to develop intervention strategies for substance use disorders that directly target emotion-based impulsivity.
In 2013, Um earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Maryland. After graduating from UMD, she received a prestigious two-year post-baccalaureate fellowship at the National Institute of Drug Abuse and worked at the Neuroimaging Research Branch where she developed interests in neuroimaging research. In 2017, she earned a master’s degree in clinical psychology from IUPUI.