Katherine Kinzler has been appointed Dean’s Fellow for Public Engagement in the College of Arts & Sciences, a three-year term that began January 1. Kinzler is chair of the Department of Psychology; she will work closely with the college’s communications team to serve as a conduit for faculty to identify areas of opportunity to raise the college’s public profile and broaden faculty engagement.
“Enhancing engagement with the public and the media has emerged as a priority for the college,” said Ray Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean of Arts and Sciences, in an email to faculty. “The Arts & Sciences communications team has done an excellent job in responding to media opportunities and promoting the research, scholarship and creative works of our college through various communications channels. The appointment of a Dean’s Fellow for Public Engagement is meant to complement and build on these efforts, especially by facilitating and supporting further faculty involvement.”
"I'm very excited about my new role in helping to communicate the importance of research to broader audiences," said Kinzler, associate professor of psychology. “I’m looking forward to working with the dean, communications office and faculty across the college to expand our engagement with the public.”
Kinzler’s work has appeared regularly in the New York Times and other major media outlets, and she was recently recognized as a Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum. Her research uses methods from developmental and social psychology to understand people’s thinking about the social world, with an emphasis on understanding the origins of prejudice and ingroup/outgroup thinking. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the John Templeton Foundation, and by Cornell’s Center for the Study of Inequality.
She received a B.A. in cognitive science from Yale University and a Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard University, and she was a Fulbright Scholar at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Prior to joining the faculty at Cornell in 2015, Kinzler was a Neubauer Family Assistant Professor and then associate professor at the University of Chicago.
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