Principal Investigator

Sylvia Perry, Ph.D. 📧 (CV) 

Dr. Sylvia Perry is the Principal Investigator of the Social Cognition and Intergroup Processes (SCIP) Lab at Northwestern University. She is originally from Raleigh, North Carolina. She completed a bachelor's degree in Psychology at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, and she received her master's and doctorate in Social Psychology from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Dr. Perry was a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral associate at Yale University. She was then an Assistant Professor of Psychological Science and an affiliate of the Department of Pediatrics in the School of Medicine (where she worked with the Vermont Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental Disabilities program) at the University of Vermont from 2014-2016. In the summer of 2016, she joined the faculty at Northwestern University, where she is an Associate Professor of Psychology, an affiliate of the Department of Medical Social Sciences at the Feinberg School of Medicine, and a Faculty Fellow in the Institute for Policy Research.

Dr. Perry investigates how bias awareness develops, and the implications of bias awareness for prejudice reduction, intergroup contact, and health disparities. She has 50 publications on these topics. She has received funding from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute, and the National Institute for Minority Health and Health Disparities, and published in journals such as the Annual Review of Psychology, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Nature Reviews Psychology, Perspectives on Psychological Science, the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Social Science & Medicine, and Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin.

Dr. Perry has received numerous awards for her teaching and research, including the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s SAGE Young Scholar Award (2021), and the Ann L. Brown Award for Excellence in Developmental Research (2024) . Her work has been featured by several national media outlets, including The Washington Post, National Public Radio, The New York Times, New York Magazine, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Dr. Perry currently serves on the editorial boards for Social Psychological and Personality Science, and the Social Cognition Section of Social and Personality Psychology Compass. She was an Associate Editor for Psychological Science from 2022-2024 and she is an Associate Editor for Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Current Directions in Psychological Science. She serves as a reviewer for the National Science Foundation and the Russell Sage Foundation. Dr. Perry is an elected fellow to the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (2019), the Association for Psychological Science (2021), the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (2024), and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2024). Dr. Perry was the 2022-23 SAGE Sara Miller McCune Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is currently Co-Director of the CASBS Summer Institute on Diversity (along with Dr. Mary Murphy) and a Research Affiliate at CASBS. She is the Co-Chair of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Summer Institute for Social and Personality Psychology (SISPP), which will be hosted at Northwestern University in the summer of 2025.

In her spare time, Sylvia likes to read graphic novels, collect designer toys, and discover new music. She and her husband also enjoy spending time with their adorable son, Henry. 

Lab Mascot