Wendy M. Williams (born 1960) is a psychologist and professor known for her research in the fields of intelligence with regards to training and development. Williams is a professor at Cornell University in their Department of Human Development. [1] Williams is also the founder of the Cornell Institute for Women in Science (CIWS), [2] a center with the intended purpose for studying and promoting women in science. Working alongside the National Science Foundation, Williams leads the "Thinking Like a Scientist" program, which intends to diversify the science community by getting girls and other underrepresented groups interested.
Williams attained her B.A. in English and Biology at Columbia University in 1982. In 1985, Williams achieved her masters at Yale University in psychology. While at Yale, Williams also obtained an M.Phil. in 1986 in the field of physical anthropology and her Ph.D. in 1991 in psychology. Williams currently works at the Cornell Institute for Women in Science, which she founded in 2009 and currently directs. She is a professor in the department of human development and specializes in intelligence.
Alongside Stephen Ceci, she has written and published many articles, as well as has authored nine personal books, including The Reluctant Reader, How to Develop Student Creativity, and The Mathematics of Sex. Williams has also edited five volumes and has had the results of her research cited in several psychology textbooks.
Williams is currently a member of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), as well as the American Psychological Association (APA) in the fields of general psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, and media psychology. While a member of the APA, Williams served as acting Member-at-Large for the Division 1 general psychology committee for two terms.
Williams leads the "Thinking Like a Scientist" program that was started at Cornell University, which serves to deepen common understanding of science and spark interest in underrepresented children. Unlike ordinary science courses, Williams's objective is not to have students understand vocabulary and terms in a compartmentalized manner, but to think scientifically in a real life manner.
Williams has received many awards and considerations over the course of her career. Williams has achieved the Senior Investigator Awards for Excellence in Research from the Mensa Foundation in 1997, 1999, and 2002. She won the Early Career Contribution Award from the APA in 1996, and the 2001 Robert Fantz Award for an Early Career Contribution to Psychology. In 2014, Williams won second place in the National Institutes of Health "Great Idea" Challenge. Her submission for the challenge was her research proposal regarding the role of gender and race in the grant-reviewing process.
Williams is a contributor for the New York Times as well as the Huffington Post, mostly with regards to sexuality having an influence on the scientific community. [3] [4]
Williams is best known for her research in the field of intelligence. Williams focuses not only on what the subjects of her research are thinking about, but also how they are thinking about the world around them. Williams also focuses heavily on the importance of sex and gender in the scientific community, which is expressed in many of her articles on The New York Times [3] and Huffington Post. [4] In an article by Wired, [5] Williams and Ceci's work on the debunking of sexual discrimination in the scientific community is referenced often to explain just why it is so hard for women to get jobs and grants.
In The Mathematics of Sex, Williams and Ceci attempt to understand why women make up a minority of the scientists within the mathematics community. In doing so, they take the three leading theories: male brains are better physically at understanding and performing advanced mathematical and spatial operations; the second being social and cultural biases prevent the training and success of women in mathematical fields; the third claims that women are not as interested in mathematic careers as men. Through the use of multiple fields of research from economics to endocrinology, Williams and Ceci discover that the reason women are not as able to enter the mathematics field is because of a complex series of life choices made that differ between women and men.
Williams also conducted research on the Halo Effect, with regards to whether students judged a teacher as good or not. Through her research, Williams learned that students often praised their professors for things outside of just teaching well; instead, students would acknowledge the equipment used or the legibility of the teachers' handwriting. These factors would then cause the students to get a false impression of their teacher, believing the instructor was good on these bases rather than how they would teach or what they would teach.
Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning.
Psychology is the study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both conscious and unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feelings, and motives. Psychology is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Biological psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.
Margaret Floy Washburn, was a leading American psychologist in the early 20th century, was best known for her experimental work in animal behavior and motor theory development. She was the first woman to be granted a PhD in psychology (1894); the second woman, after Mary Whiton Calkins, to serve as president of the American Psychological Association (1921); and the first woman elected to the Society of Experimental Psychologists. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Washburn as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, James J. Gibson, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, and Robert S. Woodworth.
Robert J. Sternberg is an American psychologist and psychometrician. He is a Professor of Human Development at Cornell University.
Mathematical psychology is an approach to psychological research that is based on mathematical modeling of perceptual, thought, cognitive and motor processes, and on the establishment of law-like rules that relate quantifiable stimulus characteristics with quantifiable behavior. The mathematical approach is used with the goal of deriving hypotheses that are more exact and thus yield stricter empirical validations. There are five major research areas in mathematical psychology: learning and memory, perception and psychophysics, choice and decision-making, language and thinking, and measurement and scaling.
Thomas J. Bouchard Jr. is an American psychologist known for his behavioral genetics studies of twins raised apart. He is professor emeritus of psychology and director of the Minnesota Center for Twin and Adoption Research at the University of Minnesota. Bouchard received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1966.
Diane F. Halpern is an American psychologist and former president of the American Psychological Association (APA). She is Dean of Social Science at the Minerva Schools at KGI and also the McElwee Family Professor of Psychology at Claremont McKenna College. She is also a former president of the Western Psychological Association, The Society for the Teaching of Psychology, and the Division of General Psychology.
Stephen J. Ceci is an American psychologist at Cornell University. He studies the accuracy of children's courtroom testimony, and he is an expert in the development of intelligence and memory. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Lifetime Contribution Awards from the American Psychological Association (APA) and the Association for Psychological Science (APS) as well as many divisional and smaller society awards.
Quantitative psychology is a field of scientific study that focuses on the mathematical modeling, research design and methodology, and statistical analysis of psychological processes. It includes tests and other devices for measuring cognitive abilities. Quantitative psychologists develop and analyze a wide variety of research methods, including those of psychometrics, a field concerned with the theory and technique of psychological measurement.
Barbara Lee Fredrickson is an American professor in the department of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology. She is also the Principal Investigator of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab (PEPLab) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Military psychology is a specialization within psychology that applies psychological science to promote the readiness of military members, organizations, and operations. Military psychologists provide support to the military in many ways, including through direct clinical care, consultation to military commanders, teaching others and supporting military training, and through research relevant to military operations and personnel. Military psychology as a field has been growing since the early 20th century, evidence that the demands and needs for psychological clinical and operational application is continuing to grow steadily. There are many stressors associated with military service, including exposure to high-risk training and combat. As such, psychologists are critical support components that assist military leaders in designing appropriate training programs, providing oversight to those programs, and assisting military members as they navigate the challenges of military training and their new lifestyle. Military psychology covers a wide range of fields throughout the military including operational, tactical, and occupational psychology. Gender differences between military-trained personnel who seek mental health assistance have been extensively studied. Specific examples include post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) associated with combat, or guilt and family/partner difficulties accompanying extended or frequent deployments due to separation. Clinical providers in military psychology are often focused on the treatment of stress, fatigue, and other personal readiness issues. Previous wars such as the Korean war, Vietnam war, and WW 2 provide great insight to the workings and practices of military psychology and how the practices have changed and assisted the military over the years.
Anne Anastasi was an American psychologist best known for her pioneering development of psychometrics. Her generative work, Psychological Testing, remains a classic text in which she drew attention to the individual being tested and therefore to the responsibilities of the testers. She called for them to go beyond test scores, to search the assessed individual's history to help them to better understand their own results and themselves.
Nora S. Newcombe is the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and the James H. Glackin Distinguished Faculty Fellow at Temple University. She is a Canadian-American researcher in cognitive development, cognitive psychology and cognitive science, and expert on the development of spatial thinking and reasoning and episodic memory. She was the principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (2006-2018), one of six Science of Learning Centers funded by the National Science Foundation.
Black psychology, also known as African-American psychology and African/Black psychology, is a scientific field that focuses on how people of African descent know and experience the world. The field, particularly in the United States, largely emerged as a result of the lack of understanding of the psychology of Black people under traditional, Westernized notions of psychology. Overall, the field combines perspectives from both Black studies and traditional psychology encapsulating a range of definitions and approaches while simultaneously proposing its own framework of understanding.
Many scholars and policymakers have noted that the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) have remained predominantly male with historically low participation among women since the origins of these fields in the 18th century during the Age of Enlightenment.
Janet Allison Taylor Spence was an American psychologist who worked in the field of the psychology of anxiety and in gender studies.
Janet Shibley Hyde is the Helen Thompson Woolley Professor of Psychology and Gender & Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is known for her research on human sexuality, sex differences, gender development, gender and science, and feminist theory, and is considered one of the leading academics in the field of gender studies.
Wendy Johnson is an American differential psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Edinburgh. She holds the chair in Differential Development in the Department of Psychology and Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology at the University of Edinburgh.
Eleanor Jack Gibson was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932, publishing her first works on research conducted as an undergraduate student. Gibson was able to circumvent the many obstacles she faced due to the Great Depression and gender discrimination, by finding research opportunities that she could meld with her own interests. Gibson, with her husband James J. Gibson, created the Gibsonian ecological theory of development, which emphasized how important perception was because it allows humans to adapt to their environments. Perhaps her most well-known contribution to psychology was the "visual cliff," which studied depth perception in both human and animal species, leading to a new understanding of perceptual development in infants. Gibson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1971, the National Academy of Education in 1972, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. In 1992, she was awarded the National Medal of Science.
The Department of Human Development was a multidisciplinary department at Cornell University from 1925 to 2021. During its lifetime, the Department led research on developmental science to simultaneously advance theory and improve life. The department emphasized an ecological perspective of human development that examined social, cultural, biological, and psychological processes and mechanisms of growth and change throughout the life cycle and across diverse contexts. Many significant social science scholars of the 20th and 21st century, including Urie Bronfenbrenner and Kurt Lewin, were among the department's faculty. A number of the department's graduate students became significant figures in the social sciences with their work tending toward interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches.