I am absolutely honored to present the SMPC Lifetime Achievement Award to Andrea Halpern. Andrea really needs no introduction, as I’m sure most of us know her well and probably have collaborated with her on a project in some way or another. As anyone who has worked with Andrea knows, she is incredibly thoughtful, creative, scientifically rigorous, and brings immense attention to detail to every project she touches. Her nominators all spoke to the impressive breadth of her research topics and her network of collaborators, with one noting that she is “singular in her ability to bring scholars together across disciplinary lines, geographic regions, and career levels.” Andrea exemplifies the qualities of collaboration, collegiality, and interdisciplinarity that are characteristic of our field.  

Importantly for the Lifetime Achievement Award, Andrea’s scientific work has laid the foundation for some of the most currently blossoming sub-topics in our field. For example, her research on musical imagery, including the development of the Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale, and neuroimaging work indicating that auditory imagery activates similar brain structures to auditory perception, was incredibly groundbreaking. As one of her letter writers said, “This way of thinking has become fairly standard, and at this point may not be surprising, but at the time Andrea published her first studies on these topics the ideas were controversial.”

One other unique and noteworthy aspect of Andrea’s career is the environment in which she has conducted this work, which is at a small liberal arts college, Bucknell University. All of her letter writers made note of this – it is incredibly unusual and difficult to have this level of impact on the field given the higher teaching loads and without the infrastructure of a PhD-granting university. To people like myself, who also work at a primarily undergraduate institution, she is a role model and inspiration. Andrea proves that you can do groundbreaking, field-defining research without having to be at an R1 university.

To conclude, as one of her letter writers said – “Not everybody has the kind of energy, breadth of knowledge, and positive outlook of an Andrea Halpern!” And I couldn’t agree more. Thank you Andrea for being such a brilliant scholar, mentor, collaborator, and friend, and congratulations on receiving this well-deserved recognition.

• As read by Amy Belfi at the 2026 SMPC Meeting