Winner of Best Student Talk at ISIR 2019
For the second year running, Ms Emily Willoughby won the Best Student Talk at ISIR 2019, with The First Longitudinal Investigation of Cognitive Ability in Adult Adoptive Families. Huge congratulations to Emily, who says “. . . what an honor to receive the award twice. Not sure if deserved, but certainly appreciated.”
Emily is starting her fourth year of a Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, where she works in personality, individual differences & behavioral genetics with James J. Lee and Matt McGue. With a background in biology, Emily’s research interests center on the genetics of cognitive ability, but she also enjoys hobbies in scientific illustration (with a focus on feathered dinosaurs) and public education on genetics, intelligence and evolution. Since starting her Ph.D. in 2016, Emily has participated in research involving cognitive ability and response time, the 3rd GWAS on years of education, polygenic scores as evidence for “genetic nurture”, and longitudinal adoption data, among other projects. She intends to pursue a postdoc in an area related to the genetic or cognitive dimensions of human ability after graduating, and dreams of one day running a lab of her own.
Representative Publications:
Willoughby, E. A., McGue, M., Iacono, W., Rustichini, A., & Lee, J. J. (in press). The role of parental genotype in predicting offspring years of education: Evidence for genetic nurture. Molecular Psychiatry.
Willoughby, E. A., Love, A. C., McGue, M., Iacono, W. G., Quigley, J., & Lee, J. J. (2019). Free will, determinism, and intuitive judgments about the heritability of behavior. Behavior Genetics, 49(2), 136–153. DOI: 10.1007/s10519-018-9931-1
Willoughby, E. A. & Boutwell, B. B. (2018). Importance of intelligence and emotional intelligence for physicians. Journal of the American Medical Association, 320(2), 205. DOI: 10.1001/jama.2018.6278