Principal Investigator

Dr. Sarah Gaither, Associate Professor, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

sarah.gaither@duke.edu

Dr. Sarah Gaither is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology & Neuroscience and a faculty affiliate at the Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. Prior to Duke, she was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Scholar in the Psychology Department and Fellow at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago after earning her Ph.D. and M.S. in Social Psychology from Tufts University and her B.A. in Social Welfare from U.C Berkeley.

Her research focuses broadly on how a person’s social identities and experiences across the lifespan motivate their social perceptions and behaviors in diverse settings. More specifically, she studies how contact with diverse others shapes social interactions, how having multiple racial or multiple social identities affects different types of social behavior and categorizations of others, and what contexts shape the development of racial perceptions and biases from childhood through adulthood. Growing up as a biracial Black/White woman is what has fueled her research path. CV

Check out the other pages in the “People” tab to meet other lab members and collaborators!

Dr. Sarah Gaither will be recruiting graduate students for this upcoming 23-24 application cycle.