How the brain remembers has a lot to do with focus. It’s in this area of cognitive science that Steven Luck, professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, has built a career pushing the frontiers of both science and teaching. 

On Friday, Dec. 6, Luck and hundreds of his students in Psychology 1Y were surprised with the news that Luck has won the 2024-2025 UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement. The award honors faculty for exceptional teaching and scholarship. The donor-funded $75,000 prize, established in 1986 and supported by the UC Davis Foundation, is among the largest of its kind in the country. 

“Dr. Luck inspires the UC Davis community with his passionate and innovative teaching style and dedication to helping students realize their full potential,” said Chancellor Gary S. May. “We are thrilled to present him with this latest well-deserved award.”

Luck was joined by colleagues, the chancellor and Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Mary Croughan in the brief classroom celebration. 

On the UC Davis faculty since 2006, Luck is a pioneer and leader in cognitive science research and has innovated in and out of the classroom to expand students’ learning and research opportunities.

Pioneering research on attention

In psychology research, attention describes when our brains focus on something specific to the exclusion of everything else. When we look at a tree, a bird, or the face of the person in front of us, our attention determines where the brain devotes its energy. Across his career studying human attention, Luck has been a pioneer and leader in cognitive neuroscience. 

Luck is a leading authority on event-related potentials, or ERPs, which are electrical responses in the brain that are triggered by something we sense, think or feel. His research has shown that attention operates through many different systems in the brain.

“He is the world’s foremost expert on event-related potentials,” Kristin Lagattuta, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at UC Davis, wrote in her nomination. “Dr. Luck’s basic research on attentional mechanisms has long had implications for psychiatric disorders, including ADHD and schizophrenia.”

Beyond studying ERPs, Luck has also developed technologies and software packages to study ERPs and shared that technology — and how to use it — with other researchers. Each year, Luck and former graduate student Emily Kappenman, now an associate professor at San Diego State University, host the ERP Boot Camp to train researchers at all stages of their careers on these research methods. 

“Professor Luck’s teaching and research are truly exemplary, yet it is their interconnectedness that distinguishes him as a teacher and scholar,” said Estella Atekwana, dean of the College of Letters and Science. “Professor Luck is a truly exceptional scholar who is dedicated to bringing his expertise and his commitment to the creation of knowledge to our students.”

Innovating in and out of the classroom

The Department of Psychology is home to the largest undergraduate major by enrollment at UC Davis, and many of its required introductory classes are taught in lecture halls with hundreds of students. Luck has made innovations to how he teaches these introductory courses so every student gets the most out of time spent in class. 

With a small amount of funding and a course on online and hybrid learning with the Center for Educational Effectiveness, he completely reworked his lectures, turning them into hundreds of bite-sized videos designed to be delivered over YouTube. After each video, students take a short quiz to make sure they understood everything they just saw. 

“I think of it like a Broadway play,” said Luck. “A Broadway play is amazing to see in person, but if you're going to turn that into a movie it's a different medium.”

During class, Luck and his teaching assistants use class time and discussion sections to put course concepts into practice. A discussion section on social psychology might start with the TA asking students to stand up and spin around twice, because a recent journal article has found that getting the body moving helps people learn better. The article found that affirmations can also increase success, so as a class they repeat “I’m going to ace the next test!” 

After a series of these tasks, which students might begin to suspect are ruses, it’s revealed that the lesson was really about how readily people will obey authority figures. The students are completely surprised, and then they use this experience with obedience to generate hypotheses about why people usually obey but sometimes disobey authority figures. 

Students have really responded to this approach to learning. Students can see instantly that they are learning the concepts in the course. Luck credits this approach to doubling the number of A’s in his classes. It has also cut the number of D’s and F’s in half.

This approach to teaching in the classroom grew naturally out of Luck’s efforts to put the science of teaching and learning into practice. Since 2015 he has served on the Faculty Advisory Board for the Center for Educational Effectiveness. He is also co-chair of the annual UC Davis conference on the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning.

“In my own classroom I use so much of what I've learned from these colleagues about what really works, and not what works in general but what works with the students at UC Davis,” said Luck.

Pushing students who aspire to a future in research

Luck has also dedicated himself to creating opportunities for undergraduate students to have the kind of early research experience that shaped his early career. In 2014, he founded Accelerating Success by Providing Intensive Research Experience, or ASPIRE, with Emily Kappenman, his graduate student at the time and now an associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University. The program places first- and second-year students with UC Davis faculty mentors who work with them to conduct world-class research through to graduation. 

Since then, ASPIRE has shifted its focus to students who will make the most of the opportunity, whatever their background. Today, over half of the UC Davis students who take part in ASPIRE are either first-generation college students or come from historically underrepresented groups or low-income backgrounds. 

“Many of our students who come from very challenging backgrounds have really thrived,” said Luck. “Some of them are now in Ph.D. programs at other top universities.”

Attention to the future of teaching

This fall, Luck is teaching the course PSC 1Y: General Psychology to 810 mostly first-year students. The course is a lot like the one where he first sat down as an undergraduate student at Reed College in Oregon and met the professor who would inspire him to build a career in psychology. His career continues today with a focus on students who make so much of his work worthwhile.

“Our students are not normal human beings,” said Luck. “They are just exceptional and interesting. They often come from very disadvantaged backgrounds but they are willing to work really hard. Thinking about our students is a big part of what I do.”

Luck, the 38th winner of the UC Davis Prize for Undergraduate Teaching and Scholarly Achievement, will be honored at a gala at the UC Davis Conference Center on Feb. 21, 2025. Previous winners are listed on the UC Davis Academic Affairs website.  

Read more about Steven Luck at the College of Letters and Science.