Dr. Debbie Yee has won the 2025 Postdoctoral Excellence Award for Community, one of three prestigious recognitions granted by the Office of University Postdoctoral Affairs (OUPA)! Yee, a postdoctoral research fellow in the CoPsy Department, also works closely with the Carney Institute.
Yee’s current research focuses on the impact of stress on decision-making, “how stress that we can and cannot control impacts how we make decisions and what are the neuromodulatory mechanisms that underlie that,” as she explained. Her past work includes research into developmental dyslexia, cognitive control, and higher order decision making.
Awarded for “go[ing] above and beyond to create an inclusive environment for postdoctoral trainees at Brown,” Yee has made building community a central tenet in her time at Brown. She shared, “We are all social creatures. When I came in, I really enjoyed interacting with postdoctoral fellows in the department, as well as through the Carney Institute. A part of our job as scientists is to not only do the science but to be able to communicate that well.”
Her many actions to this end include co-running the 2022 Growing Up in Aging Neuroscience Symposium with Dr. Hwamee Oh, serving on the organizing team for two years of the Brain ExPo Seminar Series, and most recently organizing a postdoctoral retreat. The Symposium explored aging and Alzheimer’s disease, she explained, and was focused on both crucial scientific questions and spotlighting different career progressions within the field. In thinking about this experience, she shared, “Science is a really tough job. The more that you can interact with people with diverse interests and diverse backgrounds, the more you learn a lot from others how they conduct their science and navigate their careers. I wanted to create spaces that people could learn from each other.”
This creation of space for collaborative learning continued with the Brain Expo, with Yee helping to select and bring external experts to the Brown Brain Science community. Together, she said, the committee was able to spotlight “the exciting work that a lot of my colleagues do around the country” and the speakers’ different journeys.
From there, she and co-organizer Dr. Darcy Diesburg, identified a shift in need for the community and recentered organizing efforts toward postdoctoral researchers at Brown. This culminated in the Carney Institute's first overnight postdoctoral retreat at Cape Cod, creating an interdisciplinary space for twenty postdocs to learn and find community together. She explained, “A lot of times when you start in a postdoctoral position, you don't necessarily have a cohort of people in the same way as you do in graduate school. So, we wanted to create a training opportunity and space where more junior postdocs could learn from the leaders at Carney and senior postdocs, and brainstorm ways to empower the next generation to take ownership of their postdoctoral experience.”
Since her arrival at the University in 2019, Yee has integrated learning and connection, as well as the facilitation of cutting-edge research, into the cognitive, psychological, and brain science communities of Brown. She has committed to building and amplifying postdoctoral networks and will be recognized accordingly by the OUPA.
On receiving this award, Yee reflected, “I feel very honored, and I really appreciate that Brown values community. I wouldn't be here without the support of many peers, colleagues, mentors, and administrators who have supported me on this journey. I feel very proud to have received this award, and I hope that this brings to light the different ways that bringing together the brain science community can create a more positive training environment for scientists.”
Yee will be honored during the 2025 Brown Postdoctoral Research Symposium on Thursday, March 27, 2025.