The Ohio State University at Lima is pleased to announce that two outstanding faculty members have been promoted to the rank of full professor at The Ohio State University. Patrick Carroll and Virginia Tompkins, both of the psychology department, were officially confirmed at the May 2024 Board of Trustees meeting.
At Ohio State, being named a full professor means that you have amassed an exemplary record in teaching, research and creative accomplishments, and service.
“When a faculty member is promoted to full professor, it signifies that they have achieved one of the highest academic milestones. In order to be promoted to full professor, they need to be internationally renowned in their field as a scholar while maintaining their commitment to our mission of education for citizenship,” said Dr. Margaret Young, Ohio State Lima interim dean and director. “On the Lima campus, that means that faculty like Virginia and Pat have engaged in meaningful and substantive research that has resulted in the creation of new knowledge while simultaneously bringing innovative teaching practices to the undergraduate students in our campus community.”
Dr. Tompkins’ research focuses on social cognitive development in early childhood. She is particularly interested in language, literacy, and theory of mind development. She is also interested in how these domains of development are related to social interaction with parents and teachers. She joined the Lima campus in the fall of 2009 and teaches general psychology, introduction to life span developmental psychology, psychology of childhood, psychology of the adult years, psychology of developmental disabilities, and research methods.
Dr. Tompkins was named an inaugural scholar for the Violet I. Meek Endowment for Faculty Scholarly Activity for her project “Examination of Factors Influencing Young Children’s Narrative Comprehension.” She also received the 2023 Community Engaged/Service-Learning Course Development Grant and an Affordable Learning Exchange Grant. She was named Outstanding Scholar in 2020 for her research activity and given the faculty award for Sustained Student Mentorship in 2014 and 2021.
Dr. Carroll studies the social negotiation of self across the lifespan, or how and why people revise self-views in response to social feedback. Those negotiations are represented by two sides – the changed and the changer. The first line of inquiry explores how and why someone would revise a self-view in response to social feedback, and examines the consequences of self-revision for ongoing mental health and well-being. On the changer side, Carroll studies how and why someone would try to change another person’s self-views, and examines the consequences of inducing self-revision in a social partner for ongoing relational satisfaction and well-being.
Dr. Carroll was named a fellow with the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in 2021 based on his scientific contributions in the area of preparedness and self-revision, his service to the field and his contributions to teaching, pedagogy and mentoring of undergraduate and graduate students. He won the Ohio State Lima Sustained Student Mentorship Award in 2024 and the Outstanding Scholar Award in 2016 and 2009, the same year he was named a fellow of the Society of Experimental Social Psychology. He joined the Lima campus in 2007 and teaches general psychology, data analysis, personality, social psychology, stereotyping and prejudice, the self, and history and systems. Dr. Carroll has served as faculty assembly president and co-chair of the diversity committee.