Lai wins DTEI’s Most Promising Future Faculty Award
Jocelyn Lai left UC Irvine shortly after graduation. In August, she started her postdoctoral research position at Washington University in St. Louis, but a month later, she received the Most Promising Future Faculty Award at the 31st annual Celebration of Teaching presented by the UCI Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI).
The award reflects her time here not only as a psychological science graduate student but teacher and mentor as well.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in social welfare and psychology at UC Berkeley, Lai worked with non-profit organizations and in education. Through her work experiences, she became interested in studying emotions. Between 2014 through 2018, Lai kick-started her research career, working and volunteering across several emotion labs at UC Berkeley, Stanford, and UC San Francisco.
In 2018, she started her doctoral degree at UCI. Over her five years here, Lai was also a part the Wellness Initiative in Social Ecology and served as a teaching assistant and teaching associate. She served in Professor Jessica Borelli’s The Health, Relationships, and Interventions (THRIVE) Lab and Associate Professor Elizabeth Martin’s Behaviors, Emotions, and Effect Neuroscience (BEAN) Lab.
Martin, who was Lai’s primary mentor and dissertation committee chair, called her “an exceptionally good lab member as she actively works to help her fellow graduate students and mentors several undergraduate research assistants. Her mentorship has resulted in several highly successful UROP [Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program] proposals and honors theses.”
Indeed, it was Martin who nominated Lai for DTEI’s Most Promising Future Faculty Award.
“Jocelyn is a remarkable educator in the classroom,” Martin says. “I have had the opportunity to watch her skills in this domain evolve as she was my teaching assistant on several occasions and as the instructor-of-record for her own course last quarter. Jocelyn does an outstanding job in relating the material to the students’ lives to increase engagement and learning, and quantitative and qualitative indicators show this.”
Martin continues, “I honestly cannot underscore how wonderful Jocelyn is as a researcher, graduate student, and colleague. I have no doubt Jocelyn will accomplish any goal she sets in the future, and I have no doubt she will thrive as an assistant professor soon.”
Borelli agrees.
“This is such a well-deserved honor,” she says. “Jocelyn is a serious scholar whose passion for research is matched by her dedication to mentoring. It was a joy to work with her during her time at UCI. I cannot wait to see where her interests take her.”
When asked what the award means to her, Lai replied: “It means a lot to me, and it makes me feel hopeful. Both my parents did not have the opportunity to attend college. I identify as a first-generation college student and am the first in my family to get a Ph.D. I feel grateful because people are acknowledging the work that I am doing and am interested in.”
Lai’s current program of research is understanding when, how, and why people experience and manage their emotions the way they do.
“I'm trying to understand how both individual differences – people’s own unique traits – and social contextual factors – different contexts in which people are interacting in the world around them – relate to how they experience and manage their emotions. I also am trying to look at it across the life span and in different populations.”
Lai is currently focused mostly on the research side of her postdoctoral career in St. Louis, after having nurtured, as the award would suggest, the teaching side at UCI.
“I really do find mentoring students and working with students really rewarding,” she says. “I am motivated to pursue a career in academia in part to engage in my own research interests but also support students in their own career trajectories.”
Lai credits her UCI advisors Martin and Borelli with helping to put her on her current career trajectory.
“I appreciate Dr. Martin for her support. She helped me get through the program. Any barriers I encountered, she reassured me and would be there to help walk me through them. Dr. Borelli was also supportive and introduced me to a collaborative opportunity with folks in science and nursing. I learned a lot through this collaboration. I am hoping to incorporate more use of passive sensing methods in my work, and more ways to understand people’s experiences out in the real world.”
She also singled out for praise DTEI’s Pedagogical Fellowship program with helping her and other graduate students build their own community of future teachers.
“I think a lot of my grad friends feel like I do: that I wouldn’t have been able to get through graduate school without them. To have that bond and long-term friendships have been some of the best moments at UCI.”
— Matt Coker