This is the second installment of the Getting to Know SIOP’s Award Winners. The first installment, found here [http://www.siop.org/tip/july16/aw.aspx], profiled the work of Nathan T. Carter (University of Georgia), Dev K. Dalal (University at Albany, SUNY), Anthony S. Boyce (Aon Hewitt), Matthew S. O’Connell (Select International, Inc.), Mei-Chuan Kung (Select International, Inc.), and Kristin Delgado (Select International, Inc.) winning not one but two SIOP awards: The Hogan Award for Personality and Work Performance and The Jeanneret Award for Excellence in the Study of Individual or Group Assessment. In this second and latest installment, we profile Dr. Nathan Ainspan for his Raymond A. Katzell-award-winning work with service members and veterans of the U.S. military.

At the time of this being penned, it has been 2 months and 12 days since an individual entered Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, killed 49 people, wounded 53 more, and left LGBTQ people across the United States reeling. In place of our normal standing column, we are taking a pause in order to convey, as the SIOP LGBT Committee, that our hearts go out to Orlando’s queer community as a whole, and especially to its queer Latin@ people. Nightclubs, for many LGBTQ people, are often one the few places where individuals can be authentic in the face of the discrimination experienced in their daily lives. An event like this has left cracks in the community’s psyche, as it tells us that one of the few places LGBTQ individuals could be themselves is no longer safe.

Greetings and salutations I-Opener readers both old and new! For this issue of The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist, Steven has been kind enough to extend his hand in partnership for the authoring of his column. Steven and I met this spring at the 2016 SIOP Conference in Anaheim, where we quickly realized we both had a propensity for the extra-terrestrial. Not the Spielbergian kind either—we’re talking about SPACE!, which is exactly what we (unbeknownst to each other at the time) wrote on the backs of our business cards. Today we’re going to blather on about why space is great and what’s going on in space research. We’ll end by giving you a couple of tips on how to get more involved.

This issue, I’ll be digging into the daunting world of big data visualization, sometimes called “data viz.”  This represents one of the four major application areas of big data techniques to I-O psychology and HR, alongside data gathering, data storage, and data analytics (Landers, Fink & Collmus, in press). Importantly, I’m distinguishing data visualization in the big data sense (data viz) from data visualization in the traditional SPSS-ish sense.  “Visualizing data” is something we’ve been doing for a very long time with histograms, scatterplots, pie charts and so on.  Data viz, in contrast, is a specific type of data visualization, one that focuses on interactive exploration of highly complex datasets.  When you create a scatterplot, you’re trying to illustrate to someone the relationship between two variables. When you create a data viz, you’re trying to empower the viewers of that data viz to explore whatever particular relationships they’re personally interested in without much, if any, expertise in statistics required.  In either case, the creator of data visualization must have expertise in both the subject matter being visualized and also in the art of visualization itself; historically, the training of scientists has focused more on the former, which may explain why scientists have not generally been very good at creating visualizations (Gelman, Pasarica & Dodhia, 2002).  

Exploring the Gap  Between I-O Trends  and the State of Research

The purpose of the “Bridge” column is to provide an additional conduit, building upon SIOP’s current efforts, for connecting science and practice. The column strives to accomplish this by publishing various types of article content on the subject of science and practice integration; for example, case studies of effective practice; discussions between scientists and practitioners on a relevant topic, reviews of the key scientific and practical implications of a topic area; summaries of latest research findings and their implications for practice; summaries of key practice issues and their implications for needed research; and/or, calls for research to help practitioners overcome challenges associated with effective practice (please see Poteet, Zugec, & Wallace, 2016, for more background information on the column).