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Derek Evan Nee
University of California, Berkeley http://despolab.berkeley.edu/denee/ What does your research focus on? My research focuses on elucidating the mechanisms of working memory and cognitive control. These are means to a broader understanding of the higher-level cognitive processes that are emblematic of human intelligence. My approach is to understand the mind through the brain and I leverage neuroimaging to accomplish this. What drew you to this line of research and why is it exciting to you? My initial foray into research was in artificial intelligence.
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Mary C. Murphy
The Mind and Identity in Context Lab at Indiana University www.mindandidentityincontext.com What does your research focus on? My research focuses on the science of diversity. My students and I develop and test theories about how people’s social identities and group memberships interact with the contexts they encounter to shape their thoughts, feelings, behaviors, and motivation. I study how the contexts that surround us shape our basic psychological and physiological processes, ultimately informing us about the value of our group memberships.
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Aprajita Mohanty
Stony Brook University www.psychology.stonybrook.edu/amohanty-/ What does your research focus on? My research focuses on how we utilize emotional information to guide our attention and perception, and how we use cognitive strategies to remain goal-focused in the face of emotional distractors. Most studies examining prioritization of emotional stimuli have focused on how we respond faster and more accurately to emotional stimuli. However, prior to stimulus presentation, “top-down” factors like expectation and anticipatory attention can bias perceptual and attentional processes.
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Jane Mendle
Cornell University http://blogs.cornell.edu/mendlelab/ What does your research focus on? I study a number of facets of adolescent psychopathology, but I’m particularly interested in how different aspects of puberty — its timing and tempo, its early-life antecedents, and the ways that children, peers, and family members perceive and understand it — lay the groundwork for future adjustment. My research tends to be fairly interdisciplinary, integrating developmental psychopathology with behavior genetics, public health, evolutionary psychology, and epidemiology.
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Lisa Leslie
University of Minnesota www.csom.umn.edu/faculty-research/lmleslie/Lisa_Leslie.aspx What does your research focus on? In my research, I use a social cognition perspective to understand issues related to diversity in organizations. More specifically, I am interested in people’s tendency to use social categories (e.g., gender, race, parental status) to form often erroneous perceptions and attributions about others and the self, and how to prevent such misattributions from marginalizing the career success of traditionally underrepresented groups, creating dysfunctional conflicts among diverse employees, and ultimately impeding the creation of diverse, high-performing organizations.
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Cristine Legare
Director of the Cognition, Culture, and Development Lab The University of Texas at Austin www.cristinelegare.com What does your research focus on? My work reflects my commitment to interdisciplinary approaches to the study of cognitive development. My research program draws upon diverse theoretical and methodological insights from cognitive science, cultural psychology, cognitive anthropology, and education science, to examine the cognitive foundations of cultural learning. I have conducted extensive research in southern Africa, and am currently doing research in Brazil, China, Vanuatu (a Melanesian archipelago), and the United States.
