A social psychologist at Stanford University, Jennifer L. Eberhardt conducts research on race and inequality. Through interdisciplinary collaborations and a wide-ranging array of methods — from laboratory studies to novel field experiments — Eberhardt has revealed the startling, and often dispiriting, extent to which racial imagery and judgments shape actions and outcomes in our criminal justice system and in our neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces. She not only highlights the negative impact that racial bias can have on us in these settings — she provides clear direction on what we can do about it.

After receiving her PhD from Harvard University, Eberhardt joined the faculty at Yale University in psychology and in African and African American studies. She joined the Stanford faculty in 1998, where she is currently The William R. Kimball Professor and a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford Graduate School of Business. She is also a professor of psychology, the Morris M. Doyle Centennial Professor of Public Policy, and faculty director of Stanford SPARQ — a “do tank” that brings researchers and practitioners together to fight bias, reduce disparities, and drive culture change using behavioral science. In 2014, Eberhardt was named a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow and one of Foreign Policy’s 100 Leading Global Thinkers. In 2016, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Sciences. In 2022, she was elected to the British Academy.

Beyond the academy, Eberhardt is a frequent speaker on racial bias and inequality and has been invited by some of the world’s leading organizations to share her expertise including, Facebook, Google, Apple, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, IBM, Prudential Financial, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the Kellogg Foundation. Her media appearances include outlets such as NPR, The Today Show, The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, CBS This Morning, C-Span, BBC News, PBS, CNN, Oprah’s Town Hall, TIME magazine, Wired magazine, Forbes, Fortune, Psychology Today, GeekWire, and HuffPost. Her TED Talk, “How racial bias works… and how to disrupt it,” has received more than 3.3 million views.

Eberhardt is deeply committed to public service and over the years has been invited to speak about her work at the White House, the U.S. Department of Justice, the State of California Department of Justice, the Supreme Court of California, and the California State Capitol, among other places. In 2019, she published Biased: Uncovering the Hidden Prejudice that Shapes What We, See, Think, Do (Penguin Random House), which has received book awards from the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, and was runner-up for a non-fiction Literary Peace Prize. She was also the first social scientist to win the Rockefeller University Lewis Thomas prize, an international book award established to honor the scientist as poet. In 2021, Eberhardt became the first African American president of the Association for Psychological Science — an organization with over 25,000 members worldwide. Amid unprecedented inequality and growing polarization around the world, she is enlisting science in the fight for equal justice.