Congratulations to Assistant Professor Jing Luo, PhD on Receiving an Early Career Award from the Social Personality and Health Network!

February 27, 2026

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Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine Department of Medical Social Sciences is proud to announce that Assistant Professor Jing Luo, PhD has been selected as a recipient of an Early Career Award from the Social Personality and Health Network (SPHN). This national recognition honors outstanding early career scholars whose research has made outstanding contributions to understanding the links between social personality and health processes.

Luo, a faculty member in the Department of Medical Social Sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, was recognized for her innovative and sustained research examining how individual differences shape health outcomes across the lifespan. Her work focuses on how personality traits, stress related experiences, and early life factors influence physical and cognitive health as people age.

Luo’s research spans multiple interconnected areas. One major line of her work investigates how personality traits and stress experiences relate to changes in physical and cognitive health over time. A second line explores why individuals differ so markedly in how often they encounter stressors and how intensely they experience stress, with particular attention to the roles of personality, values, and early life experiences.

Throughout her career, Luo has remained committed to studying the questions she finds most meaningful, even as research trends shift. “The topics I work on are the same ones I started with on my first day of graduate school,” she said. “Sometimes they are considered hot topics, sometimes not, but I have always chosen to continue studying what I believe is important.”

Luo joined Northwestern in 2020, shortly before the start of the COVID 19 pandemic. She credits the supportive environment at Feinberg and within the Department of Medical Social Sciences as a key factor in her growth as a researcher. She highlighted the encouragement she has received to pursue independent ideas and develop her own research agenda.

She also acknowledged the mentors who have shaped her career, including Professor Dan Mroczek, PhD, in the Department of Medical Social Sciences, who nominated her for the award, and her graduate school advisor, Brent Robert, PhD at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. “They helped me learn how to think about research and what it means to build a career as a researcher,” Luo said.

Mroczek wrote in her nomination letter, “Luo produces robust and high-quality scientific work that integrates personality and health research. Her theoretically integrated and methodologically grounded research program will undoubtedly enable her to continue making great contributions to the field of personality psychology and health psychology.”

The Department of Medical Social Sciences congratulates Jing Luo on this well-deserved honor and celebrates her continued contributions to advancing knowledge at the intersection of personality, stress, and health. We are immensely proud to count her among our faculty and look forward to the impact her work will continue to have in the years ahead.