Professor Wendy Berry Mendes
Wendy Berry Mendes is a John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University. She obtained a Ph.D. in social psychology from UC Santa Barbara in 2003 and then completed a post-doctoral training program in psychology and medicine at UC San Francisco. In 2004 she became an assistant professor of psychology at Harvard University and was promoted to associate professor in 2008. Her research questions sit at the intersection of social, personality and biological psychology, and primarily concern questions regarding embodiment - how emotions, thoughts, and intentions are experienced in the body and how bodily responses shape and influence thoughts, behavior and emotions. Some current research areas include coping with stigma and discrimination, dyadic intergroup interactions, mind-body relations across the life course, influence of emotional labeling on emotional experience, and effects of stress on decision-making. Professor Mendes won the Gordon Allport prize in 2008 for the best paper on intergroup relations, and she won the Sage Young Scholar Award in 2009.
