Wendy Berry Mendes

Wendy Berry Mendes, Ph.D., joins Yale as the Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Psychology. She is a Social Psychophysiologist who studies how the brain and body respond to emotion and stress using a variety of approaches including autonomic physiology, neuroendocrinology, and immunology. Her research interests include effects of emotion on decision-making, how discrimination affects health, and the influence of stress on cognition across the lifespan. She received her Ph.D. in social psychology from UC Santa Barbara, completed a postdoc at UCSF in psychology & medicine, and was faculty at Harvard University from 2004 to 2010. During her time at Harvard, she was named a “Favorite Professor” for five consecutive years. In 2010, she moved to UCSF Medical School where she was the Sarlo/Ekman endowed professor for 13 years. She has won several awards for her research including the Sage Young Scholar Award, the Gordon Allport Award for the best paper on intergroup relations, the Association for Psychological Science (APS) Spence Scholar Award, and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology Career Trajectory Award. Recently, she received a mentoring award from the Society for Affective Science. Mendes has served many editorial roles including a senior editor at Psychological Science, and one of the founding Editors-in-Chief of the journal Affective Science.