Jennifer Mangels, Interim Dean
I am a full professor of Psychology (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley; post-doctoral fellowship, Rotman Research Institute and the University of Toronto) and the Interim Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College. My appointment as Interim Dean in Fall 2025 follows a decade of service as the Chair of the Psychology Department, as well as recent leadership positions on committees at the school-level (WSAS Promotion and Budget Committee), college-level (Governance Review Committee, Strategic Planning Steering Committee, MSCHE Accreditation Standard V committee), and university-level (Executive Committee of Graduate Program in Psychology, Diversity Committee of the Cognitive Neuroscience Masters Program, CUNY Psychology Discipline Chair).
As Interim Dean, one of my greatest responsibilities to the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, and to Baruch College as a whole, is to foster a positive environment of creative inquiry for faculty, students, and staff. To accomplish this goal, I find myself drawing on my career-long research into the cognitive neuroscience of motivation and executive control. I have spent my academic life examining the different ways in which motivation influences the encoding and retrieval of memories through cognitive processes like goal-directed stimulus selection, strategic organization, and inhibitory control. Most crucially, I have served as either Principal Investigator or Co-Investigator on several federally and intramurally funded studies that explicitly seek to bridge this work with educational learning outcomes. These studies use behavioral and EEG/ERP methods to investigate how individual and/or environmental differences in academically-relevant motivational constructs influence selective attention to feedback and the up-regulation of control processes influencing memory updating after negative outcomes. Recently, I have applied theories of executive control, memory, and metacognition to predict how information is selected and transmitted in social environments and how different types of social interactions influence the accuracy and confidence of what is remembered.
Please visit www.mangelslab.org for current information on projects, lab members, as well as access to the BK-Norms, a database of general knowledge questions, responses, and metacognitive information that is available to the public.
Please email the WSAS Dean’s office at baruchwsas@baruch.cuny.edu to share any ideas, questions, or concerns with me as Interim Dean. I look forward to working with all of you!
Jennifer Mangels
Interim Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences