SIOP Student Member Receives Prestigious NSF Fellowship

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has granted SIOP Student member Jonas Sutphin its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP) award. SIOP Student member Elisabeth Silver also received this award and we plan to feature her in the near future. They are the only two awardees within I-O psychology to receive this honor in 2022.

Sutphin secured this distinguished award by proposing research that will investigate the inhibitory workplace practices that marginalize specific groups of workers and underestimate their performance.

“I am tremendously excited for the opportunity to conduct research to the fullest extent of my ambition through the support provided generously by the NSF,” Sutphin said. “This fellowship will allow me to form applied organizational collaborations and extend my program’s existing partnerships within industry and my professional networks within New York City.”

The first step after receiving this fellowship will be to create a thesis, then set up an experiment that will examine the decision-making reactions to specific impression management techniques within the interview process. One area that Sutphin is particularly interested in is improving the workplace for disadvantaged groups and helping them succeed, especially employees who come from low socioeconomic status (SES). He feels that concentrating on resilience factors in employees in these groups may be valuable in moderating the workplace and performance outcomes.

“This award is a tremendous vote of confidence and has put him on a national stage,” said Jonas’ advisor Julie Dinh. “The NSF GRFP is highly competitive and prestigious — and, for those who receive it, transformative. It is wonderful to see I-O psychology represented by students such as Jonas. He has worked incredibly hard over the past few years to gain experience and develop his research identity. I am thrilled that the NSF can see what we all see in him: an impressive and promising young researcher.”

By the end of his Fellowship, Sutphin hopes to reduce the disparities between the outcomes of marginalized and nonmarginalized groups in the workplace. He feels I-O psychology as a field has yet to reliably operationalize the dynamic construct of resilience. In addition, there are big gaps in the research for employees who come from adverse environments, like SES.  I-O psychologists have a unique skill set essential to studying resilience, including focus on stress, performance, and outcomes in the workplace, he said,