Speakers

Andrea Vial, Organizer and Presenter

Andrea Vial is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research takes an interdisciplinary approach drawing from social psychological, sociological, organizational, and developmental perspectives to investigate how gender stereotypes and beliefs about roles contribute to employment segregation and inequality on the basis of gender. She’s particularly interested in studying why people flock to gender-stereotypic roles, the barriers that they encounter when they don’t, and the conditions under which they can thrive in counter-stereotypic domains and occupations. Vial received her PhD in Social Psychology from Yale University in 2018. Her work has been published in high-impact journals such as Psychological Science, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Journal of Applied Psychology, and has been covered by media outlets such as Forbes and NPR. For more information about Vial’s research please visit socialroleslab.com.

Andrei Cimpian, Organizer and Presenter

Andrei Cimpian earned a PhD in psychology from Stanford University in 2008 and is now Professor of Psychology at NYU. His research investigates motivation and academic achievement, with a particular focus on how educational outcomes are shaped by gender and racial/ethnic stereotypes. Cimpian’s research has been published in top journals such as Science, Behavioral and Brain Sciences, and Psychological Science, earning him the 2018 American Psychological Association Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology. Media outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Washington Post, NPR, and The Economist have covered his work.

Julia Spielmann, Organizer and Presenter

Julia Spielmann is a postdoctoral researcher at New York University Abu Dhabi. Her research focuses on how psychological processes shape the way people engage in discrimination against members of marginalized groups (e.g., gender minorities), and how these evaluative judgments and perceptions in turn impact social outcomes of members of marginalized groups. Julia received her PhD in Social Psychology from University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2022, and has received special recognition for her research (Psychology of Teaching Institute) and teaching (Campus Award for Teaching Excellence).

Thomas Breda, Presenter

Thomas Breda is associate professor at Paris School of Economics, full-time junior researcher at CNRS, and director of the programme Employment and Labour at the Institute for Public Policy. He has graduated from Ecole normale supérieure (Paris) and holds a PhD from Ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS). His research in labor economics aims at developing new strategies to measure inequalities and discriminations and their social and institutional causes. He is interested in three types of institutions in the broadest sense: gender norms, worker representation systems, and labor market taxes. Some of his original contributions focus on the determinants of the underrepresentation of women in STEM. His research is published both as articles in international journals such as Science, PNAS, the Economic Journal and as books or articles in French.

Linzi Kemp, Presenter

Linzi Kemp is a Professor of Management at the School of Business at American University of Ras Al Khaimah. Linzi Kemp's research and teaching are in areas of Organizational Behavior, Leadership, and Women & Organizations. She teaches graduate and undergraduate students and has trained personnel for Executive Education. Her research focuses on women in employment and leadership in the United Arab Emirates, and wider Middle East region.

Kemp has been a professor at the American University of Sharjah, UAE where she co-created and taught the ‘Women in Leadership’ course, believed to be the first of its kind in the Arab Gulf states. The ‘ThinkTank on Women in Organizations (MENA)’ was co-organised by Kemp and she led and co-created the virtual ‘Centre for Women in Leadership’, which showcases women’s achievements in the Middle East, and shares multimedia resources for teaching and training. Previous experience has been in management, training, and lecturing. Kemp also spent five years with the State University of New York as Chair of a marketing and organizational behavior program, and was responsible for the professional development of part time employees. Previously in UAE, Kemp taught business at a government-sponsored college, was a professional development coordinator; and a trainer for the Institute of Leadership & Management (UK). In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, she coordinated the information technology curriculum, and was responsible for marketing a new High School. At a teacher training college in the People’s Republic of China, Kemp trained new and in-service teachers.

Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta, Presenter

Nilanjana (Buju) Dasgupta is a Provost Professor of Psychology and the inaugural Director of the Institute of Diversity Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her Bachelor’s Degree in psychology and neuroscience from Smith College and a PhD in social psychology from Yale University. She is a leader in research on implicit bias. Her work emphasizes the plasticity of implicit bias — identifying the ways in which changes in local situations modify people’s implicit attitudes, beliefs, and behavior. She uses the science of implicit bias to tackle complex social problems by designing and testing the impacts of psychological interventions in the lab and in naturally existing settings. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, and the American Psychological Foundation, and featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, International Herald Tribune, London Times, National Public Radio, Wired, Slate, PBS News Hour, ABC News, Boston Globe, Scientific American Mind, and many other outlets.

Dasgupta’s work has been recognized by the Hidden Bias Research Prize from the Kapor Center for Social Impact in Silicon Valley, the Application of Personality and Social Psychology Award from the Society for Personality & Social Psychology, and by the UMass Chancellor’s Award for Outstanding Accomplishments in Research and Creative Activity. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Maria Charles, Presenter

Maria Charles is Professor of Sociology (Department Chair 2008-2012) and faculty affiliate of the Broom Center for Demography and the Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in the comparative study of gender, with particular attention to cross-societal variability in gender segregation and gender belief systems. Charles is an elected fellow of the American Academy for Advancement of Science (AAAS), and the Sociological Research Association (SRA), and her research has been funded by awards from the National Science Foundation, Russell Sage Foundation, Spencer Foundation, and US-Israeli Binational Science Foundation. Before arriving at UCSB, she served on the Sociology faculty at UC San Diego, and was a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. She received a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University, and Bachelor’s degrees from UCSB in Environmental Studies and Political Science.

Milagros Sáinz Ibáñez, Presenter

Milagros Sáinz Ibáñez is senior researcher at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute (IN3) at the Open University of Catalunya (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), where she leads the research group “Gender and ICT Researching Gender in the Network Society” and develops her research mainly with funds from several public competitive grants (i.e., European Commission, or the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation).

She is a psychologist specializing in gender stereotypes and roles; academic motivation and choice of studies in adolescence; gender and attitudes towards technology; and careers in technology. Her research activities focus on the motivational and psychosocial factors behind the vocational segregation of girls and boys from secondary education on. This includes family and school influences on study choices; gender role development during adolescence; gender stereotypes about ability self-concepts, achievement and task-choices; gendered construction of careers of occupations; and secondary school teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards technology and technological subjects.

She has been a pre-doctoral research fellow at Stanford University and the Technical University in Berlin, as well as a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Social Research of the University of Michigan and the Department of Education Foundations of the University of South Africa. She has received funds for conducting her research in most of these international institutions. She has recently co-edited the research topic “Initiatives to raise young people's interest and participation in STEM” in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. In 2022 she was also invited by the United Nations Women to participate in the Expert Group Meeting entitled: Innovation and technological change, and education in the digital age for achieving gender equality and the empowerment of all women and girls.

Jennifer Olmsted, Presenter

Jennifer C Olmsted is currently Professor of Economics, Director of Middle East Studies and Arabic and founding and current Co-Director of the Social Entrepreneurship semester at Drew University in Madison, NJ, USA. She previously served as the Gender Advisor at the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) and has also been a consultant for a number of other UN agencies, including UN Women. She completed her BS in Foreign Service from Georgetown University, her Master’s in Agricultural Economics and her PhD in Economics from the University of California, Davis. Her areas of specialization include gender, development, and globalization with a particular focus on the Middle East and Muslim communities more broadly. She has a number of current research projects focusing on: gender issues related to (social) sustainability; the role that armed conflict plays in (re)shaping norms and economic opportunities and challenges; and an analysis of women in STEM fields, with a particular focus on Arab women in computer science. Her publications have appeared in Feminist Economics, History of the Family, Journal of Development Studies, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, Review of Radical Political Economics, Review of Social Economy, Women’s Studies International Forum, and World Development, as well as other outlets.