Official Story
Emily holds a BA in Psychology and a BFA in Music Performance from University of Nebraska. She received her PhD in Social and Personality Psychology from Cornell University, working with David Dunning. She joined the faculty at Ohio University in 2006 and then New York University in 2009. Her research examines how motivations influence visual experience, in the service of self-regulation. She applies this approach to the investigation of health behavior, legal decision-making, relationships, and underrepresentation in leadership among other social problems. Emily has received prestigious early-career awards including the Federation of Association of Behavioral and Brain Sciences Early Career Impact Award, Society for Experimental and Social Psychology Dissertation of the Year Award, Sage Young Scholars Award, and the International Society for Self and Identity Early Career Award. She has received multiple grants from NSF to support her research, and she has been recognized for her teaching with NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award and Cornell's Clark Distinguished Teaching Award.
Unofficial Story
Emily found her way to psychology after attempts at becoming a musician and rock star. Her pursuit resulted in middling achievement at best. She achieved her pinnacle success when playing an outdoor festival for 15,000 people with a major punk and rock band. But that mark came too early in her career and was followed by too many subsequent performances with marching bands in plume-covered hats and polyester suits to establish any real street cred. So she applied to graduate school in psychology instead. In the first few months of her PhD studies, Emily was already planning a very undeserved summer break in Europe, and trying to find ways to fund her anticipated 2-month travel. She designed a single study that coupled social psychology and visual perception, with the hopes of presenting the data in a poster at a vision science conference in Glasgow and winning a $500 travel grant from Cornell to defray the costs of her exploits. The study worked. The graduate school awarded the grant. And off Emily went. Upon her return, her much too accepting and open-minded graduate advisor suggested she conduct her research in consultation with the faculty at Cornell rather than in isolation and with only aspirations of one-off conference experiences - a suggestion that rightfully set her research on a much more theoretically rigorous course. That single study defined the next 20 years of Emily's research agenda and founded what is now her comprehensive examination of the pervasiveness of motivational biases in conscious and unconconscious visual perception and decision-making.