Southern Wesleyan University honors Professor of psychology Dr. Steven Hayduk as its SCICU Excellence In Teaching award recipient for 2020. Dr. Hayduk earned a Ph.D. in cognitive and developmental psychology at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) with his dissertation “The effect of strategic influences on orienting visual attention to spatial locations: A developmental perspective.” He also holds an M.A. in experimental psychology from McGill University and a B.A. in psychology from the University of Alberta.

Now in his third decade as a full-time psychology professor at Southern Wesleyan, Dr. Hayduk teaches a broad range of traditional and online courses in psychology, research, statistics, and data analytics. Hayduk currently chairs SWU’s department of social sciences. The University honored Dr. Hayduk in 2017 with the Bob Black Faculty Mentor of the Year award.

Dr. Hayduk’s professional interests include the developmental and computational bases of vision, attention and cognition. These interests extend to the study and development of artificial cognitive structures, including machine learning (e.g., artificial intelligence) and robotics. He is a member of both the Association for Psychological Science and the Association for Computing Machinery.

Prior to obtaining his doctorate and joining the Southern Wesleyan faculty, Dr. Hayduk served in the Canadian military in military intelligence and then as a Salvation Army Officer in rural Ontario, Canada. Dr. Hayduk has a second degree black belt in World Taekwondo Federation-style taekwondo and studies Taijiquan and Kobudo.