About : Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences : UMass Amherst

PBS at a Glance

Tenure-track Faculty

Lecturers

Postdoctoral Fellows

347

Honors Students

2,246

Undergraduate Major Students

Graduate Students

Neuroscience and Behavior Graduate Students

360

Neuroscience Track Majors

Research

Sponsored Grants and Contracts Awarded
Past 5 Years: $49,929,506 | FY2024: $4,357,903

The following faculty and staff leaders provide administrative support for the department and are available to answer your questions.

Ilia Karatsoreos

Professor, Department Chair

The ultimate goal of Dr Karatsoreos's research program is to understand the factors that either promote resilience or increase vulnerability to environmental challenges.

Andrew Cohen

Professor, Associate Chair for Academic Affairs

Dr. Cohen studies reasoning, judgment, decision-making, and computational modeling.

Melinda Gonzales-Backen

Associate Professor, Associate Chair of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Dr. Gonzales-Backen’s work focuses on the interface of ethnicity and adolescent development within cultural and family contexts.

Laura Wildman-Hanlon

Assistant to the Chair, Office Manager

Tobin 438
lwildman@umass.edu

Susan Young

Director of Finance and Operations

styoung@umass.edu

Yingshan Xie

Business Manager

Tobin 437
yingshanx@umass.edu

Kristin Godfrey

Research and Grants Specialist

Tobin 441
kmgodfrey@umass.edu

Evan Yeadon

Communications Coordinator

Tobin 510
eyeadon@umass.edu

Jonathan Tominar-Lipari

Lab Safety & Building Coordinator

Tobin 401
jtominar@umass.edu
(413) 545-2385

Kelly Tierney

Human Subjects and Compliance Administrator

Tobin 435
ktierney@umass.edu

Rosa Guerra

Bookkeeping

Tobin 436
rguerra@umass.edu

Joseph Bergman

Shop Supervisor

Tobin 111
jbergman@umass.edu

Michael McDermott

Facilities Operation Manager, Website Administrator

Tobin 606
mcmcd1@umass.edu

Undergraduate Program

Andrew Cohen

Professor, Associate Chair for Academic Affairs

Dr. Cohen studies reasoning, judgment, decision-making, and computational modeling.

Lori Astheimer

Senior Lecturer

Dr Astheimer's research explores the relationship between attention and language processing in children and adults.

Matt Davidson

Lecturer

My teaching interests include the development of cognitive control and executive functions, and the factors that influence mechanisms underlying these abilities in both typical and atypical cases.

Carolyn Davies

Lecturer

Dr. Davies teaches courses in clinical psychology and research methods. Her research and teaching interests include anxiety and related disorders, trauma and stress, and the intersection of science and practice. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and also an undergraduate advisor in the department.

Becky Schneider

Principal Academic Advisor

Email: schneider@umass.edu
Phone: (413) 545-0691
Location: Tobin 503

Erik Cheries

Senior Lecturer, Honors Program Director

Dr. Cheries runs the Infant Cognition Laboratory at UMass, which conducts studies to examine what our concepts are like in the first year of life, prior to the influence of language, culture, and formal education. His research currently concentrates on three main aspects of early knowledge

Ashley Woodman

Senior Lecturer, Program Director DDHS

Ashley Woodman's research primarily focuses on the impact of raising a child with an intellectual or developmental disability (IDD) on parent and family well-being, as well as the impact of family processes on the social, emotional, and behavioral development of individuals with IDD over the life course. She is also interested in how people - including parents, students and community members - make meaning of disability (e.g., disability paradigms).

Graduate Programs

Alexandra Jesse

Associate Professor, Graduate Program Director

Dr. Jesse investigates how humans recognize speech from hearing and seeing a speaker. Dr. Jesse was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship in 1999. She has received a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2005, working with Dr. Dominic Massaro. Dr. Jesse then worked as an independent researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, funding her research program through several awards from the German Research Foundation, the Max Planck Society, and through a career award (VENI) from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research. Dr. Jesse joined the UMass faculty in 2010. She is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of Linguistics. Dr. Jesse serves as an Executive Board member of the Auditory-Visual Speech Association (AVISA).

Sabrina Flagg

Graduate Administrative Assistant

sflagg@umass.edu

Program Heads

Kyle Cave

Professor

I study various aspects of visual cognition, including visual attention, visual search visual comparison, symmetry, and bias in visual processing, using behavioral methods and eyetracking.

Nilanjana Dasgupta

Professor

Research in our lab shines a light on unspoken assumptions about social groups, often called implicit stereotypes or biases, and the ways in which they impact people’s evaluations o

Kirby Deater-Deckard

Professor

Dr Deater-Deckard studies variation in human development from early childhood through adulthood.

Katherine Dixon-Gordon

Associate Professor

Dr. Dixon-Gordon is a clinical psychologist and associate professor of clinical psychology at the University of Massachusetts. Research in her lab focuses on the role of emotional processes in the development and maintenance of psychopathology, with an emphasis on borderline personality disorder (BPD).

David Moorman

Associate Professor

Dr Moorman studies cellular and network mechanisms of motivation, learning, and executive functions.