PBS at a Glance

34
Tenure-track Faculty
13
Lecturers
8
Postdoctoral Fellows
347
Honors Students
2,246
Undergraduate Major Students
66
Graduate Students
25
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.

Professor, Department Chair

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

Associate Chair for Teaching and Advising

Tammy
Associate Chair for Teaching and Advising
Tammy

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

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

Assistant to the Chair, Office Manager

Laura Wildman-Hanlon
Laura Wildman-Hanlon

Director of Finance and Operations

Susan Young
Susan Young

Business Manager

Yingshan Xie
Tobin 440
Yingshan Xie

Communications Coordinator

Evan Yeadon
Evan Yeadon

Building Coordinator

Jonathan Tominar-Lipari
Jonathan Tominar-Lipari

Human Subjects and Compliance Administrator

Kelly Tierney
Kelly Tierney

Bookkeeping

Rosa Guerra
Rosa Guerra

Shop Supervisor

Joseph Bergman
Joseph Bergman

Facilities Operation Manager, Website Administrator

Michael McDermott
Michael McDermott

 

Undergraduate Program

Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies

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

Senior Lecturer

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

Lori Astheimer

Lecturer

Matt Davidson
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.
Matt Davidson

Lecturer

Carolyn Davies
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.
Carolyn Davies

Principal Academic Advisor

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

Senior Lecturer, Honors Program Director

Erik Cheries
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
Erik Cheries

Senior Lecturer, Program Director DDHS

Ashley Woodman
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).
Ashley Woodman

Graduate Programs

Associate Professor

Alexandra Jesse
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).
Alexandra Jesse

Graduate Administrative Assistant

Sabrina Flagg
Sabrina Flagg

Program Heads

Professor

Kyle Cave
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.
Kyle Cave

Professor

Nilanjana Dasgupta
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
Nilanjana Dasgupta

Professor

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

Associate Professor

Katherine Dixon-Gordon
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).
Katherine Dixon-Gordon

Associate Professor

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