Social, Group, and Cultural Processes

Dr. Terrill O. Taylor is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology and is affiliated with the Counseling program area. He joined the University of Maryland in Fall 2023 after completing his doctoral studies at the University of North Dakota and he completed his predoctoral internship at the Counseling and Mental Health Center at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Taylor is also a former Scholar-in-Residence at the Institute for the Study of Race and Culture at Boston College.

Dr. Willis received his Ph.D. from the Clinical Psychology program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and completed an APA-accredited internship at Montefiore Hospital/Albert Einstein College of Medicine. He completed postdoctoral research training at Columbia University’s School of Social Work and University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice, and he completed postdoctoral clinical training working with children and adults at Madison Park Psychological Services in New York City. Dr.

Dr. Ethan Mereish is an Associate Professor and the director of the Lavender Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He's also an Adjunct Associate Professor at Brown University. He completed his doctoral training at Boston College, a clinical psychology residency at Harvard Medical School, and a postdoctoral research fellowship at Brown University.

I am a Professor in the Department of Psychology (Clinical and CNS Area Groups), core faculty member of the interdepartmental Neuroscience and Cognitive Science (NACS) Doctoral Program and the Maryland Neuroimaging Center (MNC), and Director of the Affective and Translational Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Maryland. My work has been continuously supported by the NIH since 2016 and led to well over 100 publications (h-index: 55).

Dr. Jordan Epistola is a postdoctoral research fellow with the University of Maryland and the Consortium of Washington Universities. Born in Seattle as a first-generation Filipino American, he earned his Ph.D. in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from the University of Maryland in 2022.

After graduation, Dr. Epistola worked as a Senior Data Analyst at Walmart HQ, applying I/O psychology principles combined with advanced analytics and machine learning solutions to automate processes, evaluate corporate programs, and identify insights to stakeholders.

Dr. Nathan Cheek (PhD, Princeton University) is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He studies how people make sense of their own and others' experiences and choices, with particular interest in biased beliefs that perpetuate and magnify inequality. Research in Dr. Cheek's lab has especially focused on people's beliefs about poverty and sexual harassment, and other recent work has investigated how people perceive their choices in relation to their identities and goals. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, Dr.