2022 Outstanding Mentorship Award: Chris Roe
Published by
Ramsés D'León
on
Tuesday, December 6, 2022
Congratualtions to Prof. Chris Roe, who has been selected to receive the PA’s 2022 Outstanding Mentor Award. This award goes to a PA member whose mentorship activities have advanced the discipline of parapsychology.
Prof. Roe is well-known in the field for his many contributions over the course of his successful career, but one area that has not yet received the recognition it deserves is his support and development of the next generations of parapsychologists. He first launched a parapsychology module at the University of Northampton, UK in 1996. It has run every year since, introducing a significant number of students to the subject. He has supervised fifteen Ph.D. candidates through to the successful completion of their studies, including many scholars who have already made their mark, such as Christine Simmonds-Moore, Elizabeth Roxburgh, Glenn Hitchman, Charmaine Sonnex and Cal Cooper. He is currently supervising thirteen Ph.D. candidates, nine of whom are working in parapsychology or the closely related field of transpersonal psychology.
Prof. Roe’s mentorship has ensured the survival of academic parapsychology in the UK. He currently holds a Chair in Psychology at the University of Northampton and is Director of the Centre for the Psychology and Social Sciences that is based there. He is the International Affiliate for England of the Parapsychology Foundation and is a Vice-President of the Society for Psychical Research (SPR).
Prof. Roe served as the Perrott-Warrick Senior Researcher (2015-2021), Chair of the British Psychological Society Transpersonal Psychology Section (2015-2018), President of the Parapsychological Association (2015-2017), and as President of the SPR (2018-2021). He is an Associate Editor for the Journal of Parapsychology and is on the editorial board for the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research and the Transpersonal Psychology Review. He has published over 120 journal papers and book chapters and given over 200 conference presentations.
His research interests are around understanding the nature of anomalous experiences and includes research on the phenomenology of paranormal experience (particularly as it affects wellbeing), the psychology of paranormal belief and of deception, as well as experimental approaches to test claims for extrasensory perception and psychokinesis, particularly where they involve psychological factors. Recent research has been concerned with the relationship between altered states of consciousness and psychic experience.
The Outstanding Mentorship Award was created to acknowledge the efforts of PA members to remedy the great disparities in the availability of career resources for students of parapsychology worldwide. In service to the PA’s international mission to promote scholarship and scientific inquiry into currently unexplained aspects of human experience, the recently-established PA Mentorship Program connects professionals and college/university students around the globe.
More information about the PA's Career Awards can be found at: https://www.parapsych.org/section/27/career_awards.aspx