Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award

2016 - Nilanjana Dasgupta

Dr. Nilanjana Dasgupta’s groundbreaking research examines unconscious or implicit bias with specific focus on the plasticity of implicit bias—i.e., the ways in which variations in social contexts cast imprints on the mind to influence the self-concept, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior toward others.  Her basic and translational research has significantly advanced our understanding of how implicit bias contributes to important social problems. Equally importantly, her work offers evidence-based interventions that promise to address these problems. The benefits of her research findings have had widespread impact on legal scholars, lawyers and judges, K-12 teachers and students, educators in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), businesses and entrepreneurs, and policy-makers at the state and federal level.  As a testament to the basic and translational value of her work, Dr. Dasgupta recently gave an invited Distinguished Lecture at the National Science Foundation. In 2014, she received the Distinguished Academic Outreach Award in Research from UMass-Amherst. In 2012, she received the Hidden Bias Research Prize awarded by Level Playing Field Institute, a private foundation based in Silicon Valley, for an “outstanding research article on gender equity in the classroom.” In 2005 she received the Morton Deutsch Award from the International Society for Justice Research. Her research findings have been featured in leading journalistic outlets including The New York Times, Boston Globe, International Herald Tribune, London Times, National Public Radio, PBS News Hour, BBC Radio, ABC News, Scientific American Mind, Slate.com, etc.  Dr. Dasgupta’s research epitomizes the ideal of theoretically incisive basic research that she applies to a wide array of important social problems and contexts and disseminates to practitioners and policy makers nationwide.