COGDOP 2027 Annual Meeting Program

Managing, Responding, and Capitalizing on Disruptive Forces

February 19–20, 2027  |  Tempe, Arizona  |  Draft — details subject to confirmation

 

The meeting will take place in Memorial Union on  the Campus of Arizona State University.

Meeting Space

Friday February 19, 2027

Memorial Union, MU 085 Union Stage (72 seats) – Main Venue

Memorial Union, MU 238 Apache (24 seats)

Memorial Union, MU 240 Navajo (24 seats)

Saturday February 20, 2027

Memorial Union, MU 228 Cochise (72 seats) – Main Venue

Memorial Union, MU 242 – La Paz (24 seats)

Memorial Union, MU 246 Coconino (24 seats)

 

Hotel and Registration Information

Lodging: Tempe Mission Palms

60 E 5th St, Tempe, Arizona, 85281, United States

Phone: +1 480-894-1400

 

COGDOP Group Rate available

Hotel booking for the conference: https://www.hyatt.com/events/en-US/group-booking/PHXDT/G-PSYC

Group Code: G-PSYC

Dates: Thu, Feb 18, 2027 – Sunday, February 21, 2027

Conference registration fee:  $350.00*

*Due to cost commitments, we cannot refund registration fees after 1/28/2027

 

 

Friday  February 19

Leadership, student opportunities, belonging, workforce development, and the realities of chairing.

TIME	SESSION AND DESCRIPTION
8:00–8:45 AM	Registration, breakfast, and informal networking
8:45–9:00 AM	Welcome and Opening Remarks — Michael Dougherty Conference overview and introduction to the theme.
9:00–10:30 AM	Opening Keynote — TBD Status: Speaker and keynote title to be confirmed.
10:30–10:45 AM	Morning Break
10:45-Noon	Making What Matters Matter — Empowering students and faculty to do good. Societal impact: How do we prepare students to contribute meaningfully to society through career and life choices?  Connecting psychology to the community: How do we build authentic connections and communities and what does it take to sustain those connections? Leading for Public Good: How do we instill the value of doing good for society when incentives say otherwise? Format: Interactivediscussion
Noon–1:30 PM	Lunch
1:30–2:30 PM	Featured Speaker — Transforming the Youth Mental Health Workforce Speaker  Katie McLaughlin, University of Oregon.
2:30–3:15 PM	Building Support for Neurodiverse Students Format: Stakeholder panel: parent, advocate, and higher-education perspectives (including GATE, as noted in the planning document). Panelists to be confirmed.
3:15–3:30 PM	Afternoon Break
3:30–4:15 PM	Parallel Chair Workshops: The Three Acts of Chairing — Learning the Ropes, Making a Difference, and Planning Your Exit Room A — New Chairs:  What I Wish I’d Known as a New Chair. Lessons learned, mistakes to avoid, building political capital, managing expectations, learning how to say no without saying no, and finding mentors (including a proposed mentorship pairing). Possible facilitators: Mike Room B — Mid-Career Chairs:  Use It or Lose It — Making Your Political Capital Count. Exercising authority, tackling entrenched problems, rebalancing faculty workload, and making meaningful changes before your term ends. Room C — Outgoing Chairs:  What’s Next? Moving Up, Moving On, or Going Back. Succession planning, transitioning back to faculty, moving into higher administration, and preserving progress. Possible facilitators: Brian and Debi. Format: Facilitated discussion with Q&A
4:15–5:00 PM	COGDOP Business Meeting
6:00 PM onward	Evening Dinners and Networking; Possible happy hour

 

Saturday  February 20

Teaching, mentoring, department capacity, AI-enabled science, and federal research policy.

TIME	SESSION AND DESCRIPTION
8:30 – 9:00	Breakfast and Networking Timing: Start time to be confirmed.
9:00–10:00 AM	Featured Speaker — Recognizing and Rewarding Good Teaching Speaker: Dea Follmer Greenhoot, University of Kansas.
10:00–10:15 AM	Morning Break
10:15–11:15 AM	Parallel Sessions: Mentoring and Faculty Capacity (tentative) Room A — Mentoring:  Measuring Mentoring: Recognizing and Rewarding. Roundtable on what good mentoring means; identifying and remediating poor mentoring; and responding when students are afraid to speak about their mentor on the record. Room B — Workload:  Faculty Workload Is the Crisis: Rebuilding Departments Around Actual Capacity. Identify, prioritize, redistribute, or stop work across teaching, mentoring, service, administration, research supervision, crisis response, and invisible labor. Format: Discussion or workshop format
11:15 AM–12:15	Julianne Baron, FABBS Status  Session title and format to be confirmed.
12:15–1:30 PM	Lunch
1:30–2:30 PM	Featured Speaker — The Future of Academic Journals in the Age of AI Speaker  Paul Litvak, Robyn Dawes Institute for the Improvement of Science.
2:30–2:45 PM	Afternoon Break
2:45–3:45 PM	Parallel Sessions: Reimagining Psychological Science in the Age of AI (workshop with readout) Room A — Scientific Enterprise:  Beyond Business as Usual: How AI Could Fundamentally Change Psychological Science. Focus: Research practices, scientific credit, collaboration, and faculty evaluation. AI may change the scale, organization, and economics of research, opening possibilities for larger, more ambitious collaborations and raising questions about scholarship and authorship. Room B — Graduate Education:  AI Has Already Changed Graduate Training. Stop Pretending This Is Just an Academic Integrity Problem. Focus: Graduate education, core competencies, assessment, and the future psychology workforce. What should graduate students know and be able to do when AI performs increasingly sophisticated research tasks? Room C — Department Leadership:  From Resistance to Reinvention: How Department Chairs Can Help Faculty and Students Navigate AI. Focus: Faculty development, infrastructure, organizational change, and equitable support. How can chairs support adoption without imposing a one-size-fits-all solution or deepening inequalities? Format: Interactive discussion with group readout
3:45–4:15 PM	Little Ideas that Make a Big Difference: How can we create a more interactive and socially engaged student body? How can we improve the sense of belonging and purpose amongst our students and faculty? How can we make our colleagues feel good even when they’re overworked and underpaid? Format: Round robin share out of strategies or initiatives that have been successful, and maybe some that have been utter failures.
4:15–5:00 PM	What Were They Thinking!? Format: Lighthearted stories of ridiculous things department chairs deal with.
6:00 PM onward	Evening Dinners and Networking; Possible happy hour

**Data Brief: Trends Across Psychology Departments

Format: Interactive data collection and report-out on graduate student cohorts, undergraduate size, faculty, startup packages, and budgets. Online survey administered during the meeting.

Transforming the Youth Mental Health Workforce

Katie A. McLaughlin, PhD

Youth mental health problems have increased dramatically in the past decade, while the availability of mental health providers has not. This workforce shortage reflects complex dynamics that make it difficult to increase the supply of providers through existing graduate training pipelines. Task-shifting involves transferring the delivery of healthcare services to providers with less specialized training and is one strategy with potential for growing the behavioral health workforce. This talk reviews evidence that non-specialist providers can effectively deliver behavioral health services and argues that a bachelor’s-level mental health profession with standardized training in evidence-based practices may be a solution to growing workforce shortages.  The child behavioral health undergraduate program at the Ballmer Institute serves as a model for how to grow the youth behavioral health workforce through creation of a bachelor’s-level profession with a scope of practice emphasizing early identification, prevention of mental health problems, brief interventions rooted in the common elements of evidence-based practices. Replication of this program at other universities is underway alongside program evaluation and policy work to create credentialing and reimbursement mechanisms needed to support sustainable employment pathways for a new profession. We invite partnership with psychology departments and universities interested in joining the movement to create a coordinated workforce development solution to the youth mental health crisis.

Learning Objectives:

1. Understand prior global initiatives aimed at expanding access to mental health services through a bachelor’s-level workforce.

2. Describe task shifting and how it has been used in global contexts to deliver evidence-based mental health interventions.

3. Describe the scope of practice for the new bachelor’s-level behavioral health provider recently created in Oregon and Nevada.

Further reading: McLaughlin, K.A., Bearman, S.K., Zalewski, M. (2026). Transforming the Youth Mental Health Workforce. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 35, 301-309.

The Future of Academic Journals in the Age of AI

Paul Litvak, Robyn Dawes Institute for Improving Science

Science had a verification problem before AI. Efforts to replicate findings in psychology exposed limits in how we evaluate published research and helped spur reforms like preregistration and open data. AI makes plausible papers cheaper to produce, which adds load to an already stretched peer review system. It also makes some kinds of checking cheaper. AI systems can extract claims and statistics, flag errors, rerun analyses when code and data are available, and update evidence syntheses as new results come in.

To see where this leads, it helps to separate the functions a journal bundles together: distribution, curation, certification, and prestige. Preprints and repositories allow research to circulate outside journals, and alternative review models have started to separate review from publication. Journals have kept their hold on prestige, though. A paper in a top journal gets the benefit of the doubt, and hiring and funding still lean heavily on venue. Much of that prestige stands in for certification (we trust the venue because checking the work ourselves is expensive). If AI makes reliable checks of individual findings inexpensive, institutions could rely less on venue as a proxy for reliability.

I’ll describe how living evidence systems could make the reliability of individual claims visible outside the journal system. I’ll also discuss what journals could do with these tools themselves, and what this means for research assessment. A lot depends on how accurate the tools turn out to be and who runs them. Done well, they could let institutions credit work that journal prestige tends to miss, like careful replications and informative null results.

Further Reading: Substack post?