The Belgian Association for Psychological Sciences (BAPS) is looking for candidates for the 2024 BAPS Early Career Award. The award recognizes the scientific excellence of researchers in psychological sciences up to 6 years after their PhD. All types of psychological research have an equal chance of receiving the award regardless of the specific psychological subdiscipline or whether it concerns basic or applied psychology.

The winner will receive 1,500€ and will give a Prize Lecture at the Annual Meeting of BAPS in 2024. The winner is also invited to contribute to a paper for Psychologica Belgica.

Because we have received few applications so far, we extend the deadline for applications until 14 February 2024 and encourage all BAPS members to actively look for candidates. The Early Career Award can be an important milestone in the scientific career of junior researchers, so please do consider nominating a colleague.

Eligibility criteria

PhD obtained between January 1st 2018 and January 1st, 2022 (the date can be extended in case of career’s interruptions such as maternity/paternity leave or sick leave).

The candidate has been a BAPS member for at least two years during the last 4 calendar years (2020, 2021, 2022, 2023) and has been working at a Belgian research institution as a primary affiliation for the last 12 months.

Application procedure

The candidate is nominated by a full member of BAPS (self-nominations are not accepted)

The nominator provides

• Two letters of recommendation (one from the nominator, one from a scientist outside Belgium)
• A 10 pages max. CV
• The PDFs of maximum 5 papers of the candidate including a brief rationale for selecting the papers
• A full list of publications (presented by year of publication; only peer-reviewed papers, books and books chapters are considered).
• A document describing the main achievements of the candidate – maximum 2 pages. This can involve scientific advancements (publications in major journals, invitation for symposia or keynote lectures, obtaining important grants, being member of editorial boards, …) and/or achievements in terms of societal impact. Dissemination of the workamongst a broad audience (e.g., media coverage) can be mentioned too.

All the documents are to be sent by the nominator via email to the past president of BAPS ( jan.dehouwer@ugent.be ) before February 14th, 2024

Evaluation process

Based on the applications that are received, an external jury of senior international researchers is composed by the BAPS executive committee, in such a way that for each applicant there is at least one jury member who has expertise related to the research of that applicant.

None of the jury members have been affiliated to a Belgian University during the past 5 years before the deadline for applications. All jury members are asked to confirm that they do not have common financial interests or a familial or substantial professional relationship (i.e., supervision of PhD, co-authorship during the past 5 years, family relations, having worked in the same lab during the past 5 years, and ongoing collaborative projects with the candidate or their supervisor[s]) and to disclose any other possible reasons for a conflict of interest. Members of the BAPS executive committee who have a conflict of interest with one of the candidates will not take part in the process of composing the jury.