Brian Hall (middle) and the award-winning students
Four students from the Department of Psychology, Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Macau (UM), won best student poster awards for their senior honours thesis poster presentations at the 2018 Convention of the American Psychological Association (APA), one of the oldest and most respected psychology associations in the world. This is the first time undergraduate students from UM’s Department of Psychology have received the best student poster awards from the APA convention, the largest annual conference in the field of psychology. The students’ supervisor is Prof Brian Hall from the same department. The poster presentations are part of Prof Hall’s ongoing public health research programme in Macao, and all the projects and data originated in Macao.
The posters presented by Yang Xinyu, Lao Chao Kei, and Yip Sheung Yan at the convention are titled ‘HIV/Syphilis Rapid Testing Uptake Correlates among Southeast Asian Migrant Workers’,‘Psychometric Properties of the PHQ-9 and the GAD-7 among Female Filipino Domestic Workers’, and ‘Validation of the PTSD Checklist-5 for Filipino Domestic Workers’, respectively.Yang and Lao both received the first prize, while Yip received the second prize, in the student poster award contest, from the Division of International Psychology (Division 52). Xiong Ying Xin’s poster is titled ‘An Exploration of Disaster and Social Media Exposure on PTSD: A Study of Typhoon Hato in Macao, China’. Xiong received the first prize in the Division 56 (Trauma) student poster awards. More than 100 undergraduate and postgraduate students submitted posters to this year’s convention. All the award-winning students come from UM’s Global and Community Mental Health Research Group under the Department of Psychology, who are also members of the Honors College.
This autumn, Yang will start her MPH-Master’s in Public Health in epidemiology at Columbia University in the United States. Xiong will pursue a MSc in Science and Society programme at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. Edward Chan, the study coordinator, will start his MPH-Master’s in Public Health in epidemiology at the University of Hong Kong. Lao and Yip will both join local non-governmental organisations in Macao to continue working on research projects with Prof Hall in Macao. To learn more about Prof Hall’s research group, please visit www.um-gmh.com