People
Director
Kurt Gray
is a Professor at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an expert in how to study people’s deepest beliefs and why they matter for society and organizations. He is also the Director of the Center for the Science of Moral Understanding, which uses interdisciplinary science to bridge social divides. He grew up in Canada, completed his BSc at the University of Waterloo and his PhD at Harvard with the late Daniel Wegner. He was almost a geophysicist instead of a social psychologist, but a cold night stranded and stalked by lynx in Northern Alberta convinced him otherwise. He is married to a neuroscientist, together they have two daughters.
Email | CV | Personal Website
Post-Doctoral Fellows
Emily Kubin
Studies how people (and the media) can reduce negative perceptions of political opponents--focusing on interventions to bridge political divides.
Sharlene Fernandes
Studies how emotions, personality traits, and cognitive biases shape moral decision-making, both in human interactions and in the development of AI. Sharlene’s research seeks to uncover the psychological mechanisms behind moral choices and their implications for ethically aligned AI and emerging technologies.
Graduate Students
Danica Wilbanks
is a 3rd-year student who studies how social network structures impact affective polarization. She also investigates how religious beliefs change over time, and how people adapt to new technology.
Lab Managers
Sam Pratt
studies the dynamics of moral outrage as well as strategies to foster mutual understanding across moral divides.
Undergraduate Research Assistants
Kaylee Parish
Levin Low
Mariam Ehab
Nivedha Prathap
Sadej Singh
Siya Patel
Anton Cedergrund
Belinda Woodard, full-time RA
Ben Bramson
Dean Van Voorhis
Hanna Li
Jade Tsai, Honors Thesis student
Former Undergraduate Research Assistants
Francisco Ceccotti, Marcella Kingman, Fatima Alanis, Kyra Klemes, Maggie Wong, Athena Zhou, Arthi Annadurai, Idil Baran, Mike O’Brien, Kirti Nimmala, Anna Wei, Vishanth Palanivel, Yuyao Huang, Andrea Bermudez, Sruthi Mannepalli, Noor Ghoneim, Ellison Commodore, Blake Ryan, Sydney Hall, Matthew Davis, Andre Chiquito, Longjiao Li, Alex Stubblebine
Lab Alumni
Samantha Abrams (Amtrak) Connor O’Fallon (U.S. Census Bureau) Will Blakey (Stanford) Carlos Rebollar (NC State) Curtis Puryear (Northwestern University) Jake Womick (Cal State Bakersfield) Joshua Jackson (Northwestern University) Rachel Hartman (CloudResearch) Yochanan Bigman (Yale University)
Daryl Cameron (Penn State)
Cameron Doyle (Facebook)
Amelia Goranson (Knox College)
Neil Hester (McGill University)
John Michael Kelly (UC-Irvine)
Chelsea Schein (Wharton)
Mihai Sirbu (Capital One)
Andrew Vonasch (Canterbury)