We are very excited to share the news that Dr. Deb Whetzel, Manager of HumRRO’s Personnel Selection & Development Program, has won the 2019 Stephen E. Bemis Memorial Award! This honor, bestowed by the International Personnel Assessment Council (IPAC), is unique because it celebrates not only the positive and significant ways that the awardee’s work has promoted the principles of merit and fairness in personnel assessment, but also a commitment to freely and enthusiastically sharing their expertise and wisdom with others. Deb’s HumRRO colleagues see these criteria as describing her perfectly—one shared that “her career is marked by example after example of being a service to her fellow practitioners…I am at a loss for what to highlight,” while another described Deb as “the ultimate team player and colleague, reliably available to assist or counsel others and share technical and career advice.”

While Deb has decades of experience in all facets of personnel testing, her unique expertise centers on situational judgment testing (SJT)—including assessment development, scoring, and implementation in a diverse range of high-stakes contexts. She is one of the leading SJT practitioners and “my go-to person for advice on the best approach for developing SJTs given clients’ goals and constraints” said a HumRRO manager, noting that “her perspective always balances fairness with validity and she applies this balanced approach throughout the test development and implementation processes.” This expertise is reflected in two books that Deb has co-edited: Applied Measurement: Industrial Psychology in Human Resources Management and Applied Measurement Methods in Industrial Psychology. She also manages HumRRO’s work on the Foreign Service Officer Test (FSOT) program for the U.S. Department of State.We are hard pressed to think of another practitioner in the field of personnel assessment who embodies the spirit of the Bemis Award as much as Deb, and we could not be any prouder. Congratulations, Deb!

To learn more about the Bemis Award, please visit https://www.ipacweb.org/bemis.