Faculty Listing

Faculty by Title

Ladder Faculty

Name Area Research Question
Howard S. Adelman Clinical Psychology How can schools best address barriers to learning and teaching and re-engage disconnected students?
Avi Adhikari Behavioral Neuroscience How do interactions between brain regions modulate fear, anxiety and related behaviors?
H. Tad Blair Behavioral Neuroscience How are perceptions, memories, and behaviors encoded by the activity of spiking neurons in the brain?
Aaron P. Blaisdell Behavioral Neuroscience What's inside the animal mind?
Idan Blank Cognitive Psychology How do different parts of the mind/brain work together such that language "means something"? What mental structures constitute these meanings? How is language related to the rest of “thought”?
Julienne Bower Health Psychology, Clinical Psychology How do stressful experiences influence the body and physical health, and what types of psychological processes and interventions can protect against those effects?
Thomas N. Bradbury Clinical Psychology Why do some relationships thrive where others falter?
Tiffany N. Brannon Social Psychology How can positive aspects of identity (e.g., pride, a sense of connection) inform (a) solutions to social disparities experienced by negatively stereotyped groups and (b) processes that facilitate intergroup attitude change?
Dean Buonomano Behavioral Neuroscience How does the brain tell time?
Bridget Callaghan Developmental Psychology, Social and Affective Neuroscience How do early experiences influence emotional, cognitive, physical, and brain development in ways that contribute to mental health and illness?
Alan Castel Cognitive Psychology How do we remember and why do we forget, and how does this change across the lifespan? How and why do we selectively remember important information, and is this adaptive as we get older?
Jaime Castrellon Social and Affective Neuroscience, Behavioral Neuroscience What are the cognitive and neural mechanisms that shape motivation and reward valuation in decisions that affect one's own well-being and the well-being of others?
Denise A. Chavira Clinical Psychology How can we optimize the development and delivery of evidence based interventions for underserved communities?
Patricia Cheng Cognitive Psychology Why and how do we come to represent the world as we do?
Bruce Chorpita Clinical Psychology How can we design systems and treatments that yield the greatest public health impact for children and families?
David Clewett Cognitive Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience, Social and Affective Neuroscience How do emotion and motivation influence attention and memory?
Michelle Craske Clinical Psychology What are the biopsychosocial risk factors for anxiety and depression and how can they be targeted in order to optimize treatment effects?
Han Du Quantitative
Naomi Eisenberger Social and Affective Neuroscience, Social Psychology Why do our social relationships have such a profound impact on our emotional and physical health? Why does being rejected feel painful, whereas being connected to others feels so good?
Craig Enders Quantitative What is best way to analyze psychological data with missing values?
Yi Feng Quantitative How to advance the SEM framework for enhanced inferential validity and how to further extend its applicability to address a broader range of research questions across various applied research scenarios?
Andrew J. Fuligni Developmental Psychology, Social and Affective Neuroscience How do sociocultural experience and biobehavioral development interact during adolescence and young adulthood?
Adriana Galván Developmental Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience What are the neural mechanisms underlying adolescent behavior?
Patricia M. Greenfield Interdisciplinary How does culture affect human development? How can we integrate psychology with the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, communication studies, political science, and ethnographic arts to answer this question?
Tiffany Ho Clinical Psychology What is the role of stress in shaping brain development and how do these neurodevelopmental changes influence the etiology, course, and treatment of depression?
Keith Holyoak Cognitive Psychology What is special about human intelligence?
Yuen J. Huo Social Psychology What are the psychological barriers to positive social relations and well-being in diverse groups?
Alicia Izquierdo Behavioral Neuroscience How does the brain compute past experience, or reward history, to contribute to decision making at the present time? How does this change in addiction?
Jaana Juvonen Developmental Psychology How do school contextual factors (e.g., ethnic composition, organizational structure) affect peer relationships and student well-being? What psychosocial benefits are associated with diversity (and for whom)?
Katherine H. Karlsgodt Clinical Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience What can neuroimaging tell us about differences in brain structure and function in individuals with schizophrenia? How do such differences relate to cognition and neurodevelopment?
Benjamin Karney Social Psychology How do intimate relationships succeed or fail?
Phil Kellman Cognitive Psychology How do we visually perceive and represent objects, shapes, scenes, and events, and how do these processes interact with thinking and learning?
Barbara Knowlton Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology How does learning occur in the brain?
Ian Krajbich Cognitive Psychology, Social and Affective Neuroscience What is the process that people use to make everyday decisions?
Jaimie Arona Krems Social Psychology, Social and Affective Neuroscience How do humans maximize the benefits + minimize the costs of our social worlds? What is the design of friendship psychology? How do people—particularly women—navigate friendships, rivalries, and other social hurdles (e.g., stigma)?
Anna S. Lau Clinical Psychology How well do evidence-based treatments, developed and tested in research settings, work in community mental health settings serving diverse and disadvantaged families and children?
Steve S. Lee Clinical Psychology What factors predict, mediate, and moderate outcomes of children with ADHD and disruptive behavior disorders?
Matthew Lieberman Social and Affective Neuroscience, Social Psychology Why are our brains wired to be social?
Falk Lieder Cognitive Psychology How can we motivate and enable people to embark on highly impactful altruistic projects and pursue them effectively?
Zili Liu Cognitive Psychology Why does the world look the way it is, and with many visual illusions? Why does the percept make sense, from an information processing perspective?
Hongjing Lu Cognitive Psychology What are the computational mechanisms underlying human perception and reasoning? How might intelligent machines emulate them?
Vickie M. Mays Clinical Psychology
Martin M. Monti Cognitive Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience (i) How does consciousness emerge from neural activity? (ii) What is the relationship between language and thought?
Amanda Kay Montoya Quantitative How do we account for dependencies in data when exploring questions of how, when, and their combination? Can repeated-measures designs assist in reducing reproducibility issues? What strengths and weaknesses do these designs have?
Lauren C. Ng Clinical Psychology What are effective, accessible, and sustainable ways to improve the wellbeing of individuals, families, and communities around the world who have been affected by trauma?
Carolyn Parkinson Social and Affective Neuroscience, Social Psychology How do our brains track and encode information about the structure of our social networks? How does social network position impact cognition and behavior? How do we understand and mentally traverse social, spatial, and temporal distances?
Efrén Pérez Social Psychology When and why do social identities become politicized—and with what consequences for mass politics in diversifying nations, like the United States?
Lara Ray Clinical Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience How does addiction progress and what treatments best target each stage?
Steven Paul Reise Quantitative Do psychological traits apply to all members of a diverse population, or is there important qualitative variation?
Dario Ringach Behavioral Neuroscience
Jesse Rissman Cognitive Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience How does the brain create and retrieve memories, and how do we regulate these processes to achieve our goals?
Theodore Robles Health Psychology, Clinical Psychology How does the quality of our closest relationships (marital and family) affect our health, and what biological mechanisms explain those effects?
Catherine M. Sandhofer Developmental Psychology How do children learn and how does the learning environment contribute?
Ladan Shams Cognitive Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience How does interaction between the senses affect how we perceive the world, ourselves, and how we learn? How can these interactions be used to improve perception and learning?
Jennifer Silvers Developmental Psychology, Social and Affective Neuroscience How does early adversity impact neurodevelopment? How do children and adolescents regulate their emotions and make decisions?
Annette L. Stanton Health Psychology, Clinical Psychology What factors promote or impede psychological and physical health in adults undergoing chronically stressful experiences, such as living with a cancer diagnosis, and how can they be targeted in effective interventions?
Jennifer Sumner Health Psychology, Clinical Psychology How do the experiences of stress and trauma contribute to accelerated aging and risk for chronic disease?
A. Janet Tomiyama Health Psychology, Social Psychology Why do we eat?
Kate Wassum Behavioral Neuroscience What are the neurochemical mechanisms of motivation and decision making?
Andrew Wikenheiser Behavioral Neuroscience How do neural representations subserve behavior?
Patrick Wilson Health Psychology How psychological processes and socio-contextual factors interact with one another and relate to health behaviors and outcomes in vulnerable populations?
Cindy Yee-Bradbury Clinical Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience How do interactions between cognition, emotion, and stress contribute to risk for psychoses and dysfunction in schizophrenia, and do they suggest pathways for intervention?

Teaching Professors

Name Area Research Question
Steve Bennoun Interdisciplinary
What are the best strategies to support student learning?
Melissa Paquette-Smith Developmental Psychology
How do we optimize learning across the lifespan?

Recalled Faculty

Name Area Research Question
Paul R. Abramson Interdisciplinary
What is the interface between sexuality and the law?
Bruce Baker Clinical Psychology
What child, family, and school factors contribute to the heightened risk for psychiatric disorders in youth with developmental delays across childhood and adolescence?
Peter M. Bentler Quantitative
Can statistics for structural equations be improved? Are model-based reliability coefficients better? Can new Guttman scaling rival Rasch or 2PL IRT? Do bifactor rotations or trinary betas ever fail?
Jan Blacher Clinical Psychology
What predicts successful school outcomes for young children with autism spectrum disorder?
Andrew Christensen Clinical Psychology
What interventions are most cost effective in improving couple relationships?
Michael Fanselow Behavioral Neuroscience
How do we learn, remember and express fear?
Franklin B. Krasne Behavioral Neuroscience
How do synaptic changes result in learning, as studied in an invertebrate? How are do mammalian fear-learning circuits work, as studied with computational neural models?
Gregory A. Miller Clinical Psychology
Behavioral Neuroscience
How does brain function go awry in schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety, and what cognition, emotion, and brain connectivity phenomena help us understand this?
Rena Repetti Clinical Psychology
Health Psychology
How do daily stressors and emotions shape the fabric of family life and, over time, the health of parents and children?
Tara Scanlan Social Psychology
What creates the psychological commitment to persist in developing one's talent? What are the consequences of developing one's talent?
Christine Dunkel Schetter Health Psychology
Social Psychology
What makes for healthy pregnancy, birth and offspring? Is stress related to adverse outcomes and how?
David O. Sears Social Psychology
How do race and ethnicity affect American politics -- both in promoting partisanship among ethnic minorities and in eliciting prejudice from whites?
James W. Stigler Developmental Psychology
Cognitive Psychology
How do people learn things that are hard to learn? Things that are learned over weeks, months, or years? What kinds of teaching methods facilitate deep learning in complex domains?
Jill M. Waterman Clinical Psychology
What factors lead to positive outcomes for families adopting children from foster care, and which therapeutic interventions enhance these factors?
Bernard Weiner Social Psychology

Adjunct Faculty

Name Area Research Question
Iris Firstenberg Cognitive Psychology
Karen Givvin Developmental Psychology
How can teachers help students learn math in a way that students can make sense of, remember, and apply?
Richard LeBeau Clinical Psychology
Philip Sayegh Clinical Psychology
How do culture and other factors affect care-seeking, assessment, diagnosis, and treatment adherence in ethnically diverse individuals with neuromedical illnesses? How do infectious diseases such as HIV/AIDS and Hepatitis C impact neurocognitive function?
Yalda T. Uhls Developmental Psychology
How do traditional and newer media impact the social behavior of preadolescent and adolescents? ​
Dahlia W. Zaidel Behavioral Neuroscience

Academic Coordinators

Name Area Research Question
William Grisham Behavioral Neuroscience
How do sex differences in brain and behavior develop? What digital teaching tools are effective in neuroscience education?
Elisheva Gross Developmental Psychology
How can an understanding of early development improve educational practices, parenting, and policy?
Carolyn Murray Cognitive Psychology

Lecturers

Name Area Research Question
Amber Ankowski Developmental Psychology
Andrew Frane Cognitive Psychology
How do we perceive rhythm, melody, and emotion in music? How can statistical practices be improved in psychology and other sciences?
Bonnie Goff Developmental Psychology
Sean McAuliffe Cognitive Psychology
Virginia Sklar Muscatello Interdisciplinary
Nicco Reggente Cognitive Psychology
How can technology induce personalized, non-ordinary experiences to promote adaptive belief updating and enhance well-being?
Leslie Rith-Najarian Clinical Psychology
Julia Schorn Cognitive Psychology
Julie Smurda Social Psychology
Jeremy Trott Behavioral Neuroscience
Jared Wong Behavioral Neuroscience

Joint Appointment Faculty

Name Area Research Question
Carrie Bearden Clinical Psychology
What are the risk factors that lead to the development of serious mental illness in adolescence?
Robert M. Bilder Clinical Psychology
What are the biological bases of cognitive stability and flexibility, and how do the relevant systems interact to impact working memory, creative cognition, and psychopathology?
James Bisley Behavioral Neuroscience
Understanding the neuronal mechanisms underlying the cognitive processing of vision
Li Cai Quantitative
Broadly speaking, my methodological research agenda involves the development, integration, and evaluation of innovative latent variable models that have wide-ranging applications in social and behavioral sciences.
Chris Evans Behavioral Neuroscience
Craig Fox Cognitive Psychology
How do people make judgments and decisions under conditions of risk, uncertainty, and ambiguity?
Tao Gao Cognitive Psychology
Perceptually grounded intelligence
Noah Goldstein Social Psychology
Shulamite Green Developmental Psychology
What is the neurobiological basis of atypical sensory processing across neurodevelopmental and clinical conditions? How do these sensory differences affect higher-order social and cognitive functioning and how can we treat them?
Jesse Harris Cognitive Psychology
How do language users incorporate different sources of information to produce sufficiently rich representations? How do linguistic and extra-linguistic information constrain interpretation during sentence processing?
Martie Haselton Social Psychology
What can evolutionary thinking tell us about our intimate relationships?
Hal Hershfield Social Psychology
How can we help move people from who they are now to who they’ll be in the future in a way that maximizes well-being?
Michael R. Irwin, MD Behavioral Neuroscience
Health Psychology
What are the psychological, behavioral, and biological factors that contribute to healthy aging, and what strategies can be delivered to reverse adverse biological mechanisms (i.e., inflammation) and prevent chronic diseases of aging?
Kerri Johnson Social Psychology
How do we form first impressions of other people from only a glimpse of their face or body? How are multiple identities integrated to yield a single impression of another person?
David J. Miklowitz Clinical Psychology
What are the roles of family risk and protective processes and family interventions in the course and treatment of bipolar disorder and psychosis?
Keith H. Nuechterlein Clinical Psychology
What is the nature and role of cognitive deficits in schizophrenia and how can we remediate them to improve the course of this disorder?
Margaret Shih Social Psychology
Alcino Silva Behavioral Neuroscience
Molecular, cellular, circuit mechanisms of learning and memory
Steve Stroessner Social Psychology
Lucina Uddin Developmental Psychology
How do dynamic brain network interactions support high-level cognitive processes across the lifespan?
Miguel Unzueta Social Psychology
Anne Warlaumont Developmental Psychology

Emeriti Faculty

Name Area Research Question
Jackson Beatty Behavioral Neuroscience
Elizabeth Ligon Bjork Cognitive Psychology
How can we optimize human learning, retention, and transfer, and how does forgetting play an adaptive role in remembering?
Robert A. Bjork Cognitive Psychology
How do we learn...and why don’t we understand how we learn?
R. Edward Geiselman Interdisciplinary
The Original Cognitive Interview: Investigative Interview techniques for use with victims, witnesses, and potential deceivers.
Gerald M. Goodman Clinical Psychology
Are the key variables for intimate conversation similar to the variables for maintainig close realtionships?, Are uncommon honesty, acceptance, and expressed empathy preictors of durable, satisfying relationships?
Carlos V. Grijalva Behavioral Neuroscience
Constance Hammen Clinical Psychology
What are the risk factors for onset and course of depression, particularly stress, family, interpersonal, and genetic predictors and how they work together?
Eric W. Holman Quantitative
What information about cognitive processes can be gleaned from statistical analyses of large data sources such as classifications and languages?
Scott Johnson Developmental Psychology
How do infants construct representations of the physical and social environment?
Donald G. MacKay Cognitive Psychology
Albert Mehrabian Interdisciplinary
Hector Myers Clinical Psychology
Health Psychology
Letitia Anne Peplau Social Psychology
Stan Schein Behavioral Neuroscience
Cognitive Psychology
What new kinds of molecular cages -- important in biology (endocytosis, viruses), chemistry (fullerenes), materials science (nanotubes), mathematics (polyhedra) and architecture (space frames) -- can we discover?
Shelley E. Taylor Health Psychology
Social Psychology
James P. Thomas Cognitive Psychology
Nancy Woolf Behavioral Neuroscience