UConn Professor Emeritus of Psychology David A. Kenny has received the Distinguished Scientist Award from the Society of Experimental Social Psychologists (SESP), the highest honor in his field.

Kenny will receive the award during the SESP national meeting in Austin, Texas in October. He is notable for his contributions to social psychology, specifically, relationships, small groups and process modeling that his peers use in their research.

Kenny earned his Ph.D in psychology at Northwestern University in 1972 and was a faculty member at Harvard University before moving to UConn in 1978. His mentor at Northwestern, Donald Campbell, won the SESP award in 1988.

Kenny is well-respected by his peers, having co-written a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that has been cited over 32,000 times since its publication in 1986. Kenny is no stranger to receiving accolades, having been appointed a Fellow in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, attaining lifetime achievement awards from the Society of Multivariate Experimental Psychology and International Association of Relationship Research in 2009 and 2010, respectively.

He also won the inaugural Methodological Innovation Award from the Society of Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) for his innovative research designs and analytic approaches. Kenny earned the SPSP’s Theoretical Innovation Prize with Tessa West of New York University for their article “The Truth and Bias Model of Judgment.”

Kenny has received over $1 million in grants in his career from the National Science Foundation and National Institute of Mental Health. Even after his retirement, his contributions keep flowing, having recently contributed a chapter in the book Analysis of Dyadic Data.

Internally, he has received the University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor Award in 2002 and University of Connecticut Alumni Distinguished Professor in 2006.

In his teaching career, Kenny has advised 25 Ph.D. students who have gone on to work in market research, think tanks, the Secret Service and universities such as the University of California, Davis and New York University.