Cheiron’s Young Scholar Award Committee is pleased to announce that Catriel Fierro, Beatriu de Pinós Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, has been chosen to receive the 2025 Young Scholar Award for his paper, “Bringing Something to the (Turn)table: Carl Rogers’ Psychotherapy Research Program and Phonographic Sound Recording Projects in Psychology in the 1930s.”

This paper examines why Carl Rogers’ phonographic recording project in psychotherapy research became canonical while similar efforts by contemporaries such as Harold Lasswell, Earl Zinn, and Felix Deutsch faded into obscurity. Drawing on previously unexamined archival materials, Fierro situates Rogers’ Ohio State University program within the broader landscape of 1930s U.S. phonographic research in psychotherapy. The paper shows that Rogers’ canonization resulted not only from individual genius, but also from the convergence of distinctive epistemic aims, institutional autonomy, effective use of student manpower, and strategic public dissemination.

The committee commends this paper as exceptionally well written. Fierro’s historiographical sophistication, methodological rigor, and artful use of primary sources make his analysis as compelling as it is intellectually engaging.

2025 Cheiron Young Scholar Award Committee
Zed Gao (chair), Verena Lehmbrock, Michael Pettit