Faculty and Staff

Office Hours – Juliastrand.youcanbook.me

Julia Strand (B.A., Tufts University; PhD., Washington University in St. Louis) teaches courses including Introduction to Psychology, the Psychology of Spoken Words, and Sensation & Perception. Her research focuses on how humans are able to turn sensory information about speech into meaningful representations. Topics of research include how cognitive abilities influence language perception, what traits of words promote easy recognition, how word recognition abilities change with age, and how visual information (seeing the talker) influences language processing.

Ken Abrams (B.A., Dartmouth College; Ph.D., University of Minnesota; LP, State of Minnesota) teaches courses in psychopathology and statistics, and a seminar on science and pseudoscience in psychology. He also leads every other fall the Carleton Cross-Cultural Psychology in Prague off-campus studies program. His research program explores the prevention and maintenance of anxiety, trauma-based, and addictive disorders. Currently, his lab team is investigating the prevention of trauma-based disorders using virtual reality. He has also been exploring with students the ethics of assessing and treating sex offenders. Other research of his has examined the association of nicotine withdrawal and carbon-dioxide hypersensitivity (a risk factor for experiencing panic), treatments for pathological gambling, and the self-medication of social anxiety and panic disorder with alcohol.

Sharon Akimoto (Ph.D., University of Utah) teaches courses in social cognition, social behavior and interpersonal processes, the psychology of prejudice, American and Asian-American studies. Her research interests include the formation and perpetuation of social stereotypes, cross-cultural understanding/misunderstanding and well-being, and Asian-American psychology.

“Mitchell Campbell (B.A., Carleton College, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison) teaches courses in social psychology, human sexuality, statistics, and new topics in psychology (e.g., social media, AI). Mitchell’s research interests include prejudice, discrimination, intergroup behavior, social marketing, influence, and motivation. Much of his research involves developing interventions to increase inclusive and/or decrease discriminatory intergroup behaviors and testing these interventions in large-scale real-world experiments.”

Office Hours: giselflores-montoya.youcanbook.me

Emily Hazlett is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology at Carleton College. She holds a B.A. in Psychology from Columbia University and a dual PhD in Human Development & Family Studies and Demography from The Pennsylvania State University. In addition to teaching Life Span Development at Carleton, she develops and teaches online courses for Penn State World Campus. In her free time, Emily enjoys playing tennis, curling, and making ice cream.

Neil Lutsky, (Ph.D., Harvard University) teaches courses in social psychology, social cognition, personality, general psychology, positive psychology, and quantitative reasoning. He is a former president of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology (Division 2 of the American Psychological Association) and the 2001 recipient of the Walter D. Mink Undergraduate Teacher Award given by the Minnesota Psychological Association and the 2011 recipient of the Charles L. Brewer Distinguished Teaching of Psychology Award given by the American Psychological Foundation. He directed a 2004-2008 Department of Education FIPSE grant to Carleton on “Quantitative Inquiry, Reasoning, and Knowledge,” and has served on the Board of Directors of the National Numeracy Network. His professional interests include the teaching of psychology, quantitative reasoning, the social psychology of obedience to authority, psychology and the Holocaust, and the study of therapy, relationship, and other life endings. Lutsky has recently served as a visiting faculty member at Ashoka University in India and at the Danish Institute for Study Abroad in Copenhagen

Office Hours:  Sarahmeerts.youcanbook.me

Sarah Meerts (B.A., Vassar College, Ph.D., Dartmouth College) teaches courses in behavioral neuroscience, hormones and behavior and the neurobiology of motivated behaviors like sexual behavior and parenting.  Sarah’s research focuses on the hormonal and neural mechanisms that mediate sexual motivation and reward.  Her research uses behavioral techniques and immunocytochemistry to better understand female rat sexual behavior and the neuroendocrine changes that occur during puberty to facilitate adult sexual behavior.

Julie Neiworth, (B.A., Psychology, Reed College; M.A., Ph.D., Experimental Psychology, Michigan State University; postdoctoral fellow,  The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston,  Department of Neurobiology and Anatomy) studies the cognitive and social thinking of nonhuman primates, humans, and birds. She has been at Carleton for 38 years! See a short video of alumni celebrating that time here. Her work has been supported by NSF and NIH, with the most recent NIH grant 1R15AG051940-02  awarded for 2021-2025.  Neiworth received the Walter D. Mink Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher Award in 2010 from the Minnesota Psychological Association (MPA). She was Chair of the psychology department for 6 years (1995-2001) and was director of the neuroscience concentration for 5 years (2007-2010, 2012-2014).  Julie is on the board of consulting editors for the Journal of Comparative Psychology. She loves teaching Introductory Psychology (Psy 110), the Psychology of Learning and Memory (Psy 210), Development and Evolutionary Trends in Cognition (Psy 371), the Neuropsychology of Aging (Psy 214 with accompanying lab, Psyc215), and Cognitive Neuroscience (Psy 366). She supervises empirical comps and independent studies in Psychology and Cognitive Science.

Mija Van Der Wege (B.A., Cognitive Science, Wellesley College; M.S.,  Statistics, Ph.D., Psychology, Stanford University) is chair of the department and teaches courses on introductory psychology, measurement and data analysis, psychology of language, human memory, and seminars on language and deception, the psychology of numbers, and psychology, technology, and design.  She also currently serves as the director of the QuIRK (Quantitative Inquiry, Reasoning, and Knowledge) program at Carleton and promotes quantitative reasoning education on campus and nationally.  Mija’s research interests focus around how people use language and memory in day-to-day life. One major area of research looks at how people make use of information about their conversational partners when they are having a conversation, for example, how conversational partners briefly and spontaneously create agreements on what words mean. Another area is how readers learn new information and change their existing beliefs based on what they read in fictional sources.

Larry Wichlinski (Ph.D., Southern Illinois University) teaches courses in behavioral neuroscience, psychopharmacology and sleep and dreaming. His research interests include the pharmacology of memory and anxiety, the behavioral and neurochemical effects of drug abuse, and sleep and dreaming.