My undergraduate education at a small liberal arts college was a defining experience for me as a student. As a psychology major at Mary Baldwin College, I became involved in conducting research with a faculty member. The individualized attention and unique experiences that I had as an undergraduate led me to graduate school and eventually back to an institution with similar values and opportunities for students. I feel fortunate now to be a part of that experience for other students as a faculty member.

At Randolph College, I teach Introduction to Psychology, Research Methods, Tests and Measures, Health Psychology, Experimental Psychology, and the Psychology of Gender. What I love about the psychology program at Randolph is that we give all of our students the opportunity to design and carry out their own empirical research. One of my favorite roles is mentoring student as they navigate the research process. Each year our senior psychology majors choose the topics that interest them the most, develop a research question, design a study, collect data, and present their results at a psychology conference. Years of experience mentoring students led me to co-write a book on the ethics of undergraduate research in psychology – Ethics in Psychological Research: A Practical Guide for the Student Scientist.

Teaching at a smaller school allows me to maintain my research interests in several different areas of psychology. My scholarship falls under the umbrella of health psychology. I am interested in how differences in personality are related to stress, coping, and overall well-being. I have studied how feelings of revenge are related to illness symptoms and how sense of humor predicts physical and psychological well-being. I also conduct research on the scholarship of teaching and learning. I am interested in how gender affects the college classroom experience for students and faculty. More recently, I have studied the efficacy of honor codes in reducing academic dishonesty. My interest in academic integrity was piqued by Randolph’s longstanding honor code.

When I am not teaching or writing, I enjoy cross-country skiing in the winter and kayaking in the summer.