A 2015 recipient of an Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung Composer Prize, Mason has recently held residencies at the SWR Experimetalstudio Freiburg and the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia Bamberg. In London, he serves as mentor to the LSO Panufnik Young Composers Project and the Philharmonia Composers’ Academy, and he recently mentored the Hong Kong Composers’ Scheme. His winning work, which premiered at the prestigious Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik by the world-renowned performers Gareth Davis, Krassimir Sterev, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the Arditti String Quartet, uses texts written by the inimitable Paul Griffiths, who has now written texts to three Grawemeyer-Award-winning works.

“In its duration, instrumentation, and musical aesthetic, Invisible Threads challenges its listeners even as it speaks to a broad audience in a musically passionate and artistic way,” said Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition Director Matthew Ertz, music librarian and associate professor at the University of Louisville’s Anderson Music Library.��“This ‘performance installation’ invites attendees to choose the way they encounter this work, enabling each to have a different experience, even as all enjoy this breathtaking music anew.”

The Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition has been given annually since 1985. Notable winners to whom Mason feels close include György Ligeti, Harrison Birtwistle, Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, Unsuk Chin and Julian Anderson. Birtwistle’s 1987 winning work The Mask of Orpheus is seen as a landmark in opera, and Saariaho won the 2003 Grawemeyer Award with her first opera, L’amour de loin.

“I’m profoundly grateful to join the company of Grawemeyer awardees,” said Mason. “This recognition of “Invisible Threads“ encourages me to dig even more deeply into long-held dreams and visions.”

Mason will accept his award at a ceremony in Louisville on April 10.

About the Grawemeyer Awards

Each year the Grawemeyer Awards honor the power of creative ideas to improve our culture via music composition, education, religion, psychology, and world order. Business executive and family man H. Charles Grawemeyer established the awards in 1984 at the University of Louisville in collaboration with Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Academics and community members choose among nominees from around the world to ensure that each winning idea is relevant to society at large. The University of Louisville announces the winners in December and presents the awards at a ceremony the following April. Each award winner receives $100,000, which they may use, if they choose, to develop and accelerate the spread of their powerful ideas. Learn more at .

It was an opportunity for her to put her work in context for herself in a way she had never done before, Vrebalov, 53, told the audience at the University of Louisville on April 11.

Vrebalov, a Serbian-American composer who now resides in New York City, was awarded the 2024 for “�Ę.”

The Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, which was the first of the five , typically receives 150 to 200 entries each year from around the world.

The work’s Latin title translates to “Mass Above Words” in English. The nontraditional work, which is performed by string quartets and girls’ chorus, features just two words in English.

“Words are not essential,” she said. “And I will say again – words are not essential for us to understand, and have insight into the abstract concepts of creativity, truth, beauty and love. These concepts represent the mental aspects of human existence and transcend language.”

Kronos Quartet, a group long known for nurturing musical innovation, and San Francisco Girls’ Chorus, a Bay Area group for young women from diverse backgrounds, premiered the work in 2018 in San Francisco.

Following her presentation, the audience had the opportunity to fully take in “Missa Supratext” by listening to the 22-minute work, which includes handbells, Tibetan bowls and musical saw.

Vrebalov said through her music, she hopes to bring people together.

“It’s about my own yearning for a world that’s filled with love and a world in which we can experience connection and belonging,” she said.

��That’s why “Missa Supratext” deliberately has no recognizable language, she said.

“We have reached a point of realizing individual freedoms as never before in history, and at the same time, our communities are fragmenting into increasingly separate worlds that often exclude each other,” Vrebalov said.

Her idea – to create a work that forces people to confront human existence – inspired her to “bypass traditional language elements and focus on a nonverbal dramatic narrative.”

“Words move us, but music can move us in ways that are not always easy to explain because it doesn’t require language,” Vrebalov said.

The $100,000 Grawemeyer prizes also honor seminal ideas in ,��,�������Ի���. Winners visit Louisville to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

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Kronos Quartet, a group long known for nurturing musical innovation, and San Francisco Girls’ Chorus, a Bay Area group for young women from diverse backgrounds, premiered the 22-minute work in 2018 in San Francisco with Valerie Sainte-Agathe conducting. The piece also incorporates bells, Tibetan bowls and musical saw.

“�Ę’ is unrelated to any religion because the creative force driving all life does not care about culture, language or religion,” Vrebalov said. “T��� words are made up and have no meaning. The piece goes beyond verbal narrative to show how all life on our planet is interconnected.”

The work’s Latin title translates to “Mass Above Words” in English.

“Vrebalov’s music transports and envelops the listener,” said Matthew Ertz, music award director. “Her winning piece emphasizes the universality of human expression through music, bypassing a single language, style or tradition. She blends together diverse harmonies, rhythms, styles and improvisations, conveying her devotion to music and to the uniqueness of all things.”

, 53, who lives in New York City, moved to the United States in 1995 and became a U.S. citizen in 2015. She has composed more than 90 works, including orchestral, chamber, opera and experimental pieces. She often starts by drawing and painting colorful images reflecting her ideas before converting the images into musical notation.

Ensembles worldwide have performed her compositions. Kronos Quartet alone has premiered 15 since 1997, and more than 25 other organizations such as Carnegie Hall and the English National Ballet have commissioned her work. Composers Edition in the United Kingdom distributes her self-published scores.

Vrebalov taught music at Serbia’s Novi Sad University and City University of New York and has been a resident or visiting artist on three continents. The Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Golden Emblem from the Serbian Ministry of Foreign Affairs are among her honors.

Recipients of next year’s are being named this week pending formal trustee approval. The annual $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in world order, psychology, education and religion. Recipients will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

“Notre Dame burned while I was writing the piece,” he said. “It was traumatizing to watch such an important icon of civilization go up in flames. The experience affected my writing.” A year earlier, as Anderson was beginning “Litanies,” Oliver Knussen, an acclaimed British composer, conductor and close friend of his, died, prompting Anderson to write the slow movement of the work in his memory.

Radio France, Hong Kong Sinfonietta, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and chamber orchestras in Norway, Sweden and Switzerland commissioned the winning, 25-minute concerto for cello and orchestra, which German cellist Alban Gerhardt and the National Orchestra of France premiered in 2020 at Radio France Auditorium. Anderson dedicated the concerto to Gerhardt in recognition of his special qualities as a cellist, he said.

“T��� explores virtually every sound a cello and orchestra can make together,” said Marc Satterwhite, who directs the Grawemeyer music award. “It spans a vast emotional range and is constantly inventive, but always toward an expressive end, never for the sake of novelty.”

, 55, studied with John Lambert, Alexander Goehr and Tristan Murail early in his career. Boston Symphony, New York Philharmonic and Cleveland Orchestra have commissioned his work, and ensembles across Europe and the United States have performed “Khorovod” and “Alhambra Fantasy,” his most played pieces. In April, “Exiles,” a piece he wrote in 2021 for voices and orchestra, premiered in Berlin.

A professor of composition and composer-in-residence at Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London since 2007, Anderson also has taught music composition at Harvard University and the Royal College of Music. In 2021 he was named a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) for his outstanding service to music.

Schott Music Ltd. publishes his compositions written after mid-2014 and Faber Music, those written before.

Recipients of next year’s are being named this week pending formal approval by trustees. The annual $100,000 prizes also honor seminal ideas in world order, psychology, education and religion. Recipients will visit Louisville in the spring to accept their awards and give free talks on their winning ideas.

“It gives me great pleasure to announce Marion Hambrick as the new executive director of the Grawemeyer Awards. Dr. Hambrick comes highly recommended by his colleagues and peers, and we are grateful for his willingness to accept the role,” said UofL Provost Lori Stewart Gonzalez.��“T��� Grawemeyer Awards pay intentional and profound tribute to the power of creative ideas and the impact a single idea can have on the world.��I am confident Dr. Hambrick has the intellectual acumen and motivation to continue advancing Charles Grawemeyer’s vision of inspiring, honoring and nurturing achievements in ,��,��, ���Ի���.”

Hambrick served as the director of the Grawemeyer Award in ����ֱ�� from 2017 to 2020. The Grawemeyer Awards are presented annually by UofL and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. By creating these awards, UofL alumnus����found a way to inspire, honor and nurture scholarly achievement.

Hambrick earned his BA in finance from Transylvania University in 1995, his MBA in finance from the University of Kentucky in 1996 and his PhD in educational leadership and organizational development with an emphasis in sport administration from UofL in 2010.

His teaching areas focus on financial principles in sports and conducting doctoral seminars in sport administration research. His research interests are centered on social network analysis in sports and recreational sport participation.

He was presented with the Red and Black Award for outstanding advising and instruction in 2010 and 2012 and was a UofL Faculty Favorite nominee in 2013 and 2015. Hambrick is a member of the North American Society for Sport Management and is lead or co-author of articles published in journals such as Managing Sport and Leisure, Sport Management Review, Journal of Sport Behavior and others.

Hambrick succeeds Charles Leonard, who retired from UofL in November.

UofL presents the annual prizes for innovative ideas and works in music composition, world order, psychology and education and gives a religion prize jointly with the seminary. Award recipients will be named at 10 a.m. EST on the following dates:

• Music Composition, Dec. 6
• Ideas Improving World Order, Dec. 7
• Psychology, Dec. 8
• ����ֱ��, Dec. 9
• Religion, Dec. 10

All recipients will be asked to visit Louisville in April to accept their $100,000 prizes and give free talks about their winning ideas.

Charles Grawemeyer, a UofL graduate, former seminary trustee and philanthropist, set up the awards program in 1984 to recognize the power of creative thought and underscore the impact a single idea can have on the world. He also asked that laypeople be involved in award selection to ensure broad understanding of the winning ideas.

The students had filtered slowly into the room that morning to participate in an exercise similar to those that McAvoy and her colleague, Diana Hess, observed taking place in high school classrooms in Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin. Their 4-year study of 35 teachers and their 1,000-plus students was the basis for the book, “T��� Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic ����ֱ��,” which earned Hess and McAvoy the 2017 Grawemeyer Award in ����ֱ��.

A seemingly simple fill-in-the-blank exercise, “When I think about American politics I feel ________ because ________,” kindled discussion among the Central High students and, under Hess and McAvoy’s guidance, grew into a lively debate that cleared the early morning brain fog and spurred the school’s library media specialist, Lynn Reynolds, to effuse, “You have opposing views and you didn’t get mad! You listened to the different sides … You’ll be active citizens. You’ll be the example.”

Hope for a better tomorrow and the belief that ideas have the power to change the world prompted H. Charles Grawemeyer to establish in 1984 the awards program that bears his name. Since then, more than $14 million has been awarded to 148 winners across five fields: music composition, political science, education, religion and psychology.

The 2017 honorees — Hess, McAvoy, Andrew Norman, Dana Burde, Gary Dorrien and Marsha Linehan — recently visited the University of Louisville and to discuss their award-winning ideas. ��

Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy – ����ֱ��

The civil exchange of ideas and opinions that led at Central High School demonstrated to students and onlookers alike that tackling controversial subjects in the classroom need not be taboo. “Our idea is that schools are a very good place to teach young people how to participate politically,” said Hess. ��

McAvoy added that when teachers encourage conversations about difficult political issues, “it is time well-spent in the classroom, that students really enjoy it, that it makes them more interested in politics, [and] they leave the class with a deeper knowledge of democracy …”

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Andrew Norman – Music Composition

“�ĘPlay’ is a universe that I created. It has a bunch of rules that determine how musicians interact with each other and the different ways they can control each other,” said of his award-winning, 47-minute orchestral work. “It’s an exploration of those ideas, control and how people react to them and then, ultimately, how a group of people might actually break through a system of rules or controls and create something new.”

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project performed the premiere of “Play” in 2013.�� Since then, the piece, which Norman said he’s rewritten “three or four times now,” has received considerable attention and critical acclaim, including a Grammy Award nomination.

Norman also outlined the distinction between listening to a recording of “Play” versus experiencing the piece being performed live. “To be there with the musicians as they’re actually making it and seeing them physically is really what this piece is about.”

Local audiences will have the opportunity next April to immerse themselves in Norman’s musical universe when the Louisville Orchestra performs “Play” as part of its Festival of American Music.

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Dana Burde – Ideas Improving World Order

earned the 2017 World Order award for analyzing the relationship between education and political violence in Afghanistan, where she’s conducted research for more than a decade. Her 2014 book, “Schools for Conflict or for Peace in Afghanistan” traces how foreign-backed funding for education can either undermine or support state-building and peacebuilding. ��

“Our U.S. government funded a curriculum to develop jihad literacy in the 1980s. And we did that because we thought it was critically important to undermine the Soviets who were occupying Afghanistan,” said Burde. “T���se textbooks cultivated a link — a very strong link — between religion and violence.”

Burde’s award-winning work also highlights positive outcomes of foreign aid and the power of good quality curricula and accessible, community-based schools. “Thoughtful aid that responds to important needs and social services can be very effective and much of our aid in Afghanistan has been, I would argue.”

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Gary Dorrien – Religion

Beginning in the late 1800s and continuing through the early 20th century, progressive Christian leaders in North America advocated the Church’s responsibility to deal with the earthly matters of human rights and equality. This religious social-reform movement is known as the Social Gospel and has been widely — and incompletely — documented. ����

“I have long had this belief that the most important part of the story of the American Social Gospel and its enormous influence in American life, in politics, in society, in religion has just not been told because mostly it gets told as though it’s mostly white people and their institutions, and their ecumenical movement and their churches … that ends up dominating the narrative,” said , whose 2015 book, “T��� New Abolition: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel,” earned him the 2017 religion award, which is presented jointly by UofL and the .

Dorrien details the history of the Black Social Gospel and how it became a critical forerunner of the civil rights movement. “T��� greatest story we have in this country is the story of Martin Luther King Jr., and his formation, and his impact on society…” he said. “I hope it is an okay book, but I know it’s on a great subject.”

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Marsha Linehan – Psychology

“My goal was to treat people who were high risk for suicide and difficult to treat,” said psychology winner . “I was looking to get people, essentially, out of hell.”

Linehan’s goal was achieved through her trial-and-error development of Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), which research has shown to be effective for conditions previously considered untreatable, including chronic suicidality and borderline personality disorder. DBT teaches patients new behavioral skills to balance acceptance and change, and was the first psychotherapy to incorporate the practice of mindfulness — being fully aware in the present moment and developing a nonjudgmental attitude — as an essential component.

“A lot of the treatment, not all of it but a lot of it, is training people how to change their own behavior to change their own lives,” said Linehan. “And the goal of the entire treatment is how to build a life that you experience as worth living.”

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The Grawemeyer Awards have been a longstanding tradition at the University of Louisville, created to honor those who have impacted the world with just a single idea. UofL graduate, former Louisville Seminary trustee, and philanthropist Charles Grawemeyer founded the awards program in 1984 to pay tribute to the power of creative thought.

The awards draw nominations from all over the world, recognizing pioneers in five fields – Music Composition, Ideas Improving World Order, ����ֱ��, Religion and Psychology. Past winners have included those who have studied the promise of public education in America, developed potential treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder, sought ways to achieve lasting peace in the Middle East, explored why Christianity has failed in its attempts to heal racial divides, and used native, traditional music to pay tribute to victims of Cambodian genocide.

The list includes Aaron Beck, considered to be the founder of cognitive therapy, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. This year’s honorees and their ideas loom just as large. Their stories are featured below.

Music Composition

Andrew Norman, a Los Angeles-based composer of orchestral, chamber and vocal music, wrote “Play” for the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, which premiered the piece in 2013 and released a recording on its own label. In three movements, “Play,” this year’s winner of the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, explores the relationship of choice and chance, freewill and control.

The piece investigates the ways musicians in an orchestra can play with, against, or apart from one another; and maps concepts from the world of video gaming onto traditional symphonic structures to tell a fractured narrative of power, manipulation, deceit and, ultimately, cooperation.��

“�ĘPlay’ combines brilliant orchestration, which is at once wildly inventive and idiomatic, with a terrific and convincing musical shape based on a relatively small amount of musical source material,” said Award Director Marc Satterwhite. “It ranges effortlessly from brash to intimate and holds the listener’s interest for all of its 47 minutes — no small feat in these days of shortened attention spans.” ��

“Play” has also been nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Classical Contemporary Composition, and Norman was recently named Musical America’s 2017 Composer of the Year.

Ideas Improving World Order

Dana Burde’s 2014 book, “Schools for Conflict or for Peace in Afghanistan,” explores the influence foreign-backed funding for education has on war-torn countries and how such aid affects humanitarian and peace-building efforts. Because of her analysis on this topic, Burde, an associate professor of international education at NYU, is this year’s winner of the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order.

“I argue that instead of preventing conflict, U.S. aid to education in Afghanistan contributed to it — deliberately in the 1980s, with violence-infused, anti-Soviet curricula, and inadvertently in the 2000s, with misguided stabilization programs,” Burde wrote. “In both of these phases, education aid was subordinated to the political goals of strong states and used as a strategic tool — a situation made possible in part by humanitarians’ tendency to neglect education’s role in conflict.”����

Drawing on extensive research on the impact of U.S.-funded community-based education programs, Burde also makes a case for a sounder understanding of the role of education in state-building and recommends contributing to sustainable peace through expanded access to community-based education with neutral, quality curriculum. Her book was grounded in eight years of field research in Afghanistan and Pakistan and backed by two decades of work on education in countries affected by conflict.��

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Immigration. Gun control. Abortion. Gay rights. Religion. Are these and other polarizing topics too controversial to be discussed in today’s high school classrooms? According to Diana Hess and Paula McAvoy, co-winners of the 2017 Grawemeyer Award in ����ֱ��, teachers should encourage conversations about difficult issues. These discussions, they opine, help students understand diverse points of view and become more politically engaged adults.

Hess and McAvoy’s 2014 book, “T��� Political Classroom: Evidence and Ethics in Democratic ����ֱ��,” explores the role of teachers in perpetuating serious political deliberation in schools. The book is based on a 4-year study of 35 teachers and their 1,000-plus students.

“Teachers are beginning to worry that all controversial topics are taboo,” said ����ֱ�� Award Director Marion Hambrick. “This timely book dispels that notion and provides tangible evidence that the classroom is an unusual political place where students can learn to carefully examine divisive issues.”

is dean of the School of ����ֱ�� at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and directs the Center for Ethics and ����ֱ�� at the same university.

Religion

In “T��� New Abolition: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Black Social Gospel,” social ethicist Gary Dorrien describes the early history of the Black Social Gospel from its 19th-century founding to its close association in the 20th century with W.E.B. Du Bois. He offers a new perspective on modern Christianity and the civil rights era by delineating the tradition of social justice theology and activism that led to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dorrien’s book earned him the 2017 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, given jointly by UofL and the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

“We urgently need this historical and theological account in our religious communities and public discourse,” said Tyler Mayfield, Faculty Director of the Grawemeyer Award in Religion and the A.B. Rhodes Associate Professor of Old Testament at Louisville Seminary. “Dorrien’s book highlights a disremembered part of American religious history, one that holds relevance for contemporary discussions about race and U.S. religion. His compelling narration of the Black Social Gospel as a profoundly religious tradition of thought and activism underscores the crucial connections among the Black Church, social Christianity, the creation of black institutions, and the struggle for freedom.”

Dorrien, an Episcopal priest, is a professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and professor of Religion at Columbia University.

Psychology

Marsha Linehan, a psychology professor at the University of Washington, developed Dialectical Behavior Therapy, which balances acceptance and commitment to change in treating mental illness, distinguishing it from previous standard interventions. Research shows DBT to be an effective treatment for conditions previously considered untreatable, such as borderline personality disorder.

Linehan’s work has earned her the 2017 Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. In developing DBT, she sought out difficult-to-treat, suicidal individuals and, by trial and error, created an effective intervention, which led to treatment for multiple disorders. She drew on her personal experiences — she acknowledged publicly in 2011 her own longtime struggle with high suicidality — and training as a spiritual director and Zen Master to develop an approach that taught patients how to regulate dysfunctional behaviors. The therapy relies on a toolkit of behavioral skills, including mindfulness practices, that were previously not common in mainstream psychology.

��“In addition to being considered the state-of-the-art treatment for chronically suicidal individuals, dialectical behavior therapy has been found to be effective for other behavioral disorders, including eating disorders, addiction, anxiety related disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder and depression,” said Professor Woody Petry, award director.

All 2017 winners will present free lectures about their award-winning ideas when they visit Louisville in April to accept their $100,000 prizes.

Holman and her fellow 2016 recipients — Hans Abrahamsen, Gary Haugen, Victor Boutros, Karl Alexander, Linda Olson and Steven Maier — are the latest in a line of more than 130 people whose powerful ideas and creative works have been encircled in the spotlight of H. Charles Grawemeyer’s vision and generosity. A University of Louisville graduate, entrepreneur and philanthropist, Grawemeyer believed ideas have the power to change the world and so established the awards program to recognize��achievements in several fields of endeavor: music composition, world order, education, religion and psychology.

The 2016 honorees recently visited the University of Louisville to accept their $100,000 prizes and to discuss their award-winning works with hundreds of lecture-attending students, faculty, staff and community members. ����

Hans Abrahamsen – Music Composition

The Grawemeyer Award-winning song cycle for soprano and orchestra, “let me tell you,” is about “a woman who dares now to take her words and tell her story,” said Danish composer .

His half-hour work presents a first-person narrative by Ophelia, the tragic noblewoman from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.” The libretto by Paul Griffiths is adapted from his 2008 novel — also titled “let me tell you” — and consists of seven poems created using only the minimal vocabulary that Shakespeare originally scripted for Ophelia.��

“T��� voice of the singer, somehow she is created out of the orchestra, out of the music,” said Abrahamsen. “She becomes stronger and stronger.”

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Gary Haugen and Victor Boutros – Ideas Improving World Order

“T��� poor are struggling to get out of their circumstances of desperation and that effort is just totally undercut by these predatory forces of violence that are not being controlled in the developing world,” said Haugen, founder and president of the International Justice Mission, a human rights organization that works with local authorities to combat violence and build justice systems. ��

The absence of law enforcement in developing countries and how it undermines the fight against global poverty is explored in the 2014 book, “T��� Locust Effect: Why the End of Poverty Requires the End of Violence.” The work earned this year’s award for Ideas Improving World Order.

“You don’t want to draw nearer to pain that you feel can’t change. For me, the great hope that has come from doing this work … is seeing that [conditions] do change,” said Boutros, a visiting scholar at George Washington University Law School and a former federal prosecutor for the U.S. Department of Justice, where he investigated human trafficking and hate crimes around the country. “That has been such an encouragement that the Grawemeyer Award has brought to me because I know that its focus is not just on world impact, but ideas that are really feasible.”

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Karl Alexander and Linda Olson – ����ֱ�� ��

����ֱ�� can’t trump impoverished beginnings. That key conclusion, outlined in the 2014 book “T��� Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth, and the Transition to Adulthood,” earned authors this year’s education prize. The sociologists’ decades-long research study of 800 Baltimore-area urban youths from first grade through adulthood challenges the idea that access to public education means equal opportunity.

“We’d like to think this is the land of opportunity. That if you work hard, play by the rules, do what your parents tell you, do what your teachers tell you, then good things will follow,” said Alexander. “We would like to think that we’re able to deliver on that promise, but in point of fact, the reality is: it falls short.” ��

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Susan R. Holman – Religion

Having earned degrees in religious studies, nutrition and psychology, , a senior writer at the Global Health ����ֱ�� and Learning Incubator at Harvard University, is uniquely qualified to address what she calls a “divide between religion and health.” Her award-winning idea—that faith-based and human rights organizations’ divergent ideological approaches can create discord and ultimately undermine both groups’ efforts to address global health issues — is examined in the book, “Beholden: Religion, Global Health, and Human Rights.”

“I thought, ‘There needs to be some kind of basic primer to help my faith-based friends actually learn the … human rights language and something that would also speak to the public health people to realize that dialogue and appreciation for history has benefits,’ ” said Holman.

The religion prize is awarded jointly by the University of Louisville and the .

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Steven Maier – Psychology

“What makes some people vulnerable to bad events and what makes others resilient and bounce back?” said , distinguished professor of psychology and neuroscience and Center for Neuroscience director at University of Colorado-Boulder. “Once we can get an idea of the fundamental differences, can we figure out how the brain makes this happen?”

His pursuit to answer these questions led to the discovery of a brain mechanism that not only produces resilience to trauma but also aids in coping with future adversity and earned Maier the 2016 psychology prize. The idea that behavioral control induces resilience has become important in psychology, neuroscience and other academic disciplines, as well as clinical research and therapies for depression and anxiety disorders. Maier laid the groundwork for understanding the brain mechanism involved in how one assesses and deals with adverse events.

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Interested in hearing more from the 2016 Grawemeyer Award winners?�� Listen to these extended interviews featured on the UofL Today with Mark Hebert radio show:

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