Dr. Wallsten is former department chair and professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland-College Park.  He received his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. Following 30 years on the faculty at the University of University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, he moved to Maryland in 2000.  He has held visiting appointments at The University of Chicago, Duke University, Haifa University in Israel, and Universität Oldenburg in Germany, the latter with the aid of a Humboldt Foundation Senior Scientist Award, and most recently as a visiting scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development Center for Adaptive Rationality. A cognitive and mathematical psychologist, he has published well over 100 articles and chapters primarily in the areas of probabilistic inference, judgment, choice, and communication under risk and uncertainty.  He is a former editor of the Journal of Mathematical Psychology, a former associate editor of Psychometrika and of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and currently on the editorial board of the journal Decision. He has served on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Science Advisory Board, as an associate of the National Intelligence Council, and in various advisory roles for the National Science Foundation, including a grant review panel and Committees of Visitors for two different directorates.  He is an elected fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and the American Psychological Association, a charter fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, a past president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making, and a past-president of the Federation of Behavioral, Psychological, and Cognitive Sciences (now known as FABBS – Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences).  His current research focuses on developing methods for eliciting, modeling and aggregating continuous subjective probability distributions regarding real-world sociopolitical events. 

Doctoral Programs

  • Cognitive and Neural Systems (CNS)
  • Social, Decision, and Organizational Sciences (SDOS)

Degrees

  • PhD
    Psychology

Current Students

Former Students

  • Student Name
    Dan Ariely
    Current Position
    Professor, Duke University
  • Student Name
    Joseph Neil Bearden
    Current Position
    Professor, INSEAD, Singapore
  • Student Name
    Randall Bender
    Current Position
    Senior Psychometric Statistician at Evidera, Chapel Hill NC
  • Student Name
    Sophie Hummer
    Current Position
    Director, Research & Technical Services at Brown-Forman, Louisville, KY
  • Student Name
    Alberto Bonazzi
    Current Position
    Co-director, Scuola Biodanza Lombardia, Milan Italy
  • Student Name
    James Cox
    Current Position
    Director of Text Analytics R&D at SAS Institute, Inc.
  • Student Name
    Harold Delaney
    Current Position
    Professor, University of New Mexico
  • Student Name
    Mandeep Dhami
    Current Position
    Professor, Middlesex University, London
  • Student Name
    Ido Erev
    Current Position
    Professor, The Technion, Haifa, Israel
  • Student Name
    Barbara Forsyth
    Current Position
    Consultant
  • Student Name
    Claudia Gonzalez-Vallejo
    Current Position
    Associate professor, Ohio University
  • Student Name
    Hongbin Gu
    Current Position
    Associate professor, University of North Carolina
  • Student Name
    Yoonhee Jang
    Current Position
    Assistant professor, University of Montana
  • Student Name
    Hong Jiang
    Current Position
    Manager, Deloitte
  • Student Name
    Erika Manning
  • Student Name
    Timothy J. Pleskac
    Current Position
    Senior Scientist, Max Planck Inst. for Human Develop., Center for Adaptive Rationality, Berlin
  • Student Name
    Petra Scheck-Bradley
    Current Position
    Associate Research Scientist, Univ. of Maryland Center for Advanced Study of Language
  • Student Name
    Andrea Shapiro
    Current Position
    Organizational Change Training StrategyPerspective.com
  • Student Name
    Yaron Shlomi
    Current Position
    Director of Research, Media Innovation Lab, Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya, Israel
  • Student Name
    Paul Thompson
    Current Position
    Director, Methodology and Data Analysis Center, Sanford Research/Univ. South Dakota
  • Student Name
    Hsuchi Ting
    Current Position
    Risk Management Consultant at Discover Financial Services, Houston TX
  • Student Name
    Rami Zwick
    Current Position
    Associate dean and professor, Univ. of California-Riverside
Tom Wallsten
Biology/Psychology
Department of Psychology
Email
tswallst [at] umd.edu