Our Team

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Calvin Lai (he/him)

Assistant Professor
Psychology Building 425B
calvinlai@wustl.edu | CV | Google Scholar
[Pronunciation: “KAL-vin LYE”]

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Jennifer Beatty (she/her)

Graduate Student
jenn.beatty@wustl.edu | CV

Jennifer is a doctoral student at the Diversity Science Lab at Washington University in St. Louis. She has master’s degrees in Applied Positive Psychology and Education from the University of Pennsylvania and worked as a research coordinator at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She was also a K-8 teacher with Teach for America before graduate school. Her primary research interests include interventions for long-term bias reduction, power dynamics, and intergroup relations. In her spare time, Jenn enjoys culinary adventures both in her kitchen and at new restaurants.

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Grace Drake (she/her)

Graduate Student
drake.g@wustl.edu | CV

Grace is a first-year graduate student in the Diversity Science Lab. Before coming to Washington University, she earned a B.S. in Psychology with a minor in Health and Human Values at Davidson College and worked as a lab manager of the Davidson Intergroup Studies Lab. Her research interests broadly include reducing bias and discrimination, confronting prejudice, and the relationship between implicit bias and behavior.

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Messi Lee (he/him)

Graduate Student
hojunlee@wustl.edu | CV

Messi is a graduate student in the Diversity Science Lab. He is planning to take the Psychological and Brain Sciences Track in the Division of Computational and Data Sciences (DCDS). He earned his BSc in Quantitative Social Analysis at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology where he found his interest in political text analyses. His primary research interests involve using word embeddings to study intergroup biases and using social network analysis to study group dynamics.

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Izilda Pereira-Jorge (she/her)

Lab Manager
jorgeizildaa@gmail.com | CV

Izilda is the lab manager for the Diversity Science Lab (DSL). She earned her B.A. in Psychology and Philosophy at Rutgers University, where she completed her honors thesis on perceptions of prejudice from essentialism endorsement and evaluated consequences of essentialism encounters amongst sexual minorities. Izilda plans to pursue a PhD in Social Psychology and is interested in research involving intergroup relations, prejudice, long-term bias reduction, and power hierarchies.

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Lab Pets

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Lab Alumni

Postdoctoral Scholars

• Pierce Ekstrom (Assistant Professor of Political Science at University of Nebraska – Lincoln)

Graduate Students

• Megan Wilson (continuing her PhD in Social/Personality Psychology at Patrick Hill‘s lab at WUSTL, studying when & how adversity leads to activism)

Lab Managers

• Joel Le Forestier (completing a PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Toronto)
• Jackie Lisnek (completing a PhD in Social Psychology at the University of Virginia)
• Kimia Saadatian (completing a PhD in Social Psychology at Stanford University)

Research Assistants

Alicia Zhang, Andrea Esparza, Ansley Calandra, Becca Clark-Callender, Elena Murray, Gina Vellequette, Grace Boney, Grace Campbell, Jacqueline Kumble, Jasmine Jaggers, Jo Christina, Julia Norman, Kelly Wang, Mackenzie Hines-Wilson, Max Klapow, Mira Reed Twiss, Nick Blake, Nicole Chang, Sabrina Genovese, Sean Dunnsue, Shelby Miller, Vivian Hao.