Awards and Council Nominations

Call for Nominations for Office

The Association’s Nominations Committee invites nominations for the positions of EARA President, Council Member, International Representative to Council, and Student Representative to Council for terms beginning in April of a biennial meeting year. Nominations must be received no later than October of a preceding year. Contact the EARA Executive Office for actual deadline dates and the address for mailing the application materials.

EARA Awards

During the Awards Ceremony at the Association’s biennial meetings, the following two awards are presented: The EARA Young Scholar Award, and the EARA Honorary Lifetime Membership Award. Our Awards Committee is responsible for selecting the winners of the awards. A list of recipients follows the description of each award.

The Young Scholar Award was established in 2000. This award recognizes outstanding scholastic promise in research on adolescence. The award recognizes the international publications following from a dissertation that significantly contribute to the understanding of adolescence and development during adolescence. The Young Scholar Award is given biennially by the European Association for Research on Adolescence to one young scholar who has published empirical or theoretical studies in international journals or volumes that contribute significantly to understanding adolescence and adolescent development. At the EARA conference, the awarded scholar will be given the opportunity to present his or her research and ideas.

Nominations for the Young Scholar Award require a letter outlining the merits of the award nominee, 5 copies of a 3-5 page abstract of the dissertation, 3 copies of the full dissertation, and 1 additional letter of recommendation. Nominations are due in the early spring of the year of the biennial meeting.

Previous Awardees:

2000 Rutger Engels	2002 Henrik Andershed
2004 Susan Branje	2006 Geertjan Overbeek
2008 Koen Luyckx	2010 Maarten van Zalk

Dr. Maarten Van Zalk received the EARA Young Scholar Award 2010. In 2009, he received his PhD with Wim Meeus and Susan Branje at Utrecht University in the Netherlands under his former name Maarten Selfhout. He is now working as a postdoc with Hakan Stattin and Margaret Kerr in the Örebro center in Sweden.
Maarten’s passion has been understanding the role of friendships in adolescent development, particularly why youths select each other as friends and why some friendships are more enduring than others. Maarten goes beyond the individual level and applies a variety of state-of-the-art techniques of dyadic longitudinal data analyses, person centered approaches, and social network analyses.
During his doctoral studies, he published 11 first-author articles in high-impact journals and wrote 4 more in a time span of four years. The exceptional quality of Maarten’s work is also shown by a cum laude award for his dissertation and three prizes from The Institute for the Study of Education and Human Development (ISED), the Dutch National Research School for Pedagogues and Developmental Psychology. In addition, he won a prestigious Rubicon Award from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, and two grants from the Swedish Research Council.

The EARA Honorary Lifetime Membership Award was founded in 2004 to honor EARA’s founding president. Dr. Jackson was especially interested in peer relationships, parent-adolescent relationships, and coping. His impact on the field of adolescent was profound and revolutionary. This award recognizes an individual whose overall program of work has had a significant impact on our understanding of development and behavior during the second decade of the life-span.

Nominations for the EARA Honorary Lifetime Membership Award require a letter outlining the merits of the award nominee, 3 letters of recommendation, and copies of 3 scholarly articles or chapters that represent the nominee’s contributions. Nominations are due in the early spring of the year of the biennial meeting.

Exact deadlines and information regarding application materials are specified in the call for nominations circulated on the website and in the newsletter.

2008 Harke Bosma	2008 Augusto Palmonari

2010 Leo Hendry

Leo B. Hendry is the winner of the EARA Lifetime Achievement Award 2010. Leos research career has spanned a considerable time - his first published article, in the USA, was in 1968! He has written 17 books and 25 book chapters and over 150 articles, and still is very productive.
Leo Hendry has bridged many gaps in his scientific work, among them the method gap- (either qualitative or quantitative?), but also the discipline gap. This is not only visible in the different positions he held (Professor of Education, Professor of Health studies and Professor of Psychology. Although there is no doubt that Leo Hendry is a true Scott, Leo is more international than most of us are. He collaborated with many colleagues from different countries and he has 14 visiting professorships.
Further, theoretical issues and conceptualizations were typical for him, reflecting on the focal theory, developing a life span model with Marion Kloepp, where they were able to show that the beginning and ending of each developmental phase is nowadays less clear than ever- a tenet that has immense practical consequences for parents, teachers, counselors. Further, very important was the revision of the concept of emerging adulthood, to name just a few of his theoretical contributions.
Leo has a continuing interest in sport and physical education but also focused on research topics like health, life style, puberty, parenting practices, drinking, drugs, HIV, work, unemployment, friendships, migration, mentoring, retirement, cultural identity, and emerging adulthood.
So, no question, Leo deserves this Award deeply. He has brought our society a good step forward as critical thinker, as somebody who asks inconvenient questions (the Lucifer function), in his strong effort to go beyond disciplines, to have an eye and heart for the disadvantaged and to bring in our personalities. He also did a lot of boundary work between segregated groups!