Colleagues and Co-Authors

Janine Olthuis ’08, Assistant Professor at the University of New Brunswick, Canada

Major: Psychology, with a sociology minor

Byron Zamboanga’s influential courses: Introduction to Psychology, Psychology of Adolescence and Emerging Adulthood

How we started working together: “I started working for him pretty early on, in my second year, when he hired me to help research the psychosocial correlates of adolescent and young adult substance abuse. I remember sitting at the computer emailing colleagues for him, thinking, ‘How does this man trust me?’ But he gave me a lot of independence in that mentorship role.”

He made graduate school seem possible: “In my third year, he told me I could get funding for grad school. He walked me through the whole process. I ended up getting a Ph.D. from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia, Canada, in clinical psychology. Recently, I got a pretty big grant for research, from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and he was one of the first people I told.”

Shared research: “I came back to Smith in May 2011 and did a two-day workshop with him on adolescents and alcohol abuse for teachers and students. We had collected data from Northampton High School while I was at Smith, and had agreed to give the results of our research back to the community.”

I will pay it forward: “I’ve been really, really fortunate. I try not to take it for granted. I made my job choice with mentorship in mind because I want the chance to mentor and have relationships with my students.”

MENTOR: BYRON ZAMBOANGA 

Professor of Psychology 

Photograph by Sam Masinter

Soccer fan Byron Zamboanga remembers meeting Janine Olthuis when she was a soccer recruit. Later, in his Intro to Psychology class, Olthuis distinguished herself by her ability to synthesize knowledge. “I said to myself, ‘Wow, this person has incredible analytic and writing skills,’” he recalls, “‘especially this early in a college career.’” He was impressed with her leadership, something he credits to her experience on the soccer field. Since then, the two have published 18 articles together, with two more in the works. Zamboanga proudly speaks of his former student’s accomplishments, such as winning a $500,000 federal grant to do research on anxiety sensitivity and treatment, and getting published in one of the field’s most prestigious journals. Next, Olthuis and Zamboanga will collaborate on an international study of drinking-game behaviors with colleagues in Australia, the United Kingdom, the Philippines and Portugal. “One of the things I find most fulfilling,” he says, “is to see young people develop into phenomenal researchers, something they would never have imagined when they first stepped onto Smith’s campus.”

This story appears in the Winter 2016-17 issue of the Smith Alumnae Quarterly.

Photograph by Dean Casavechia