A Psychology professor has been honored with an international award for professional excellence.
Krzysztof Kaniasty received the Stress and Anxiety Research Society (STAR) Lifetime Career Award during the thirty-second STAR Conference in Münster, Germany.
This award is presented annually to honor a current member of STAR who has a long and distinguished history of scientific contributions to one or more of the following areas: stress, coping, emotions, and health.
Kaniasty has done extensive study on social support after natural disasters and trauma and has published widely on the subject. He is the author of Natural Disaster or Social Catastrophe? Psychosocial Consequences of the 1997 Polish Flood and co-author of Stress and Psychological Resources: Coping with Life Changes, Occupational Demands, Educational Challenges, and Threats to Physical and Emotional Well-Being. He has had more than fifty articles published in professional journals.
He serves on the editorial board of the international journal Anxiety, Stress & Coping and was chief editor from 2001 to 2007. He was an associate editor of The Encyclopedia of Psychological Trauma.
He has been an invited presenter at more than 150 different national and international conferences and meetings and has been the recipient of more than $400,000 for grants and funded research.
In addition to the STAR lifetime award, he has been honored by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education for his book on the 1997 Polish flood and by IUP with two awards, the Sponsored Program Award for Outstanding Achievement in Research and the Distinguished Faculty Award for Research.
The Stress and Anxiety Research Society is a multidisciplinary, international organization of researchers who share an interest in problems of stress, coping, and anxiety. Its members, from more than thirty-five countries, meet annually to exchange research findings and clinical applications on a wide range of stress, coping, and anxiety-related phenomena.
At the conference, Kaniasty gave a keynote address, “Disasters or Social Catastrophes? On Social Psychological Reactions of Communities Coping with Natural and Human-Induced Disasters.” He also made two presentations: “The Link between Received and Perceived Social Support Is Mediated by Social Psychological Growth Following Adversity” and “Development of the Warsaw Appraisal of Political Stress Inventory.”
Kaniasty has been at IUP since 1990. He has his master's degree from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, and his Ph.D. in social-community psychology from the University of Louisville.