Tess Neal

Tess Neal is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the ASU New College of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences.  She is both a researcher and a licensed psychologist (State of Arizona #4630 and State of Nebraska #844).  She obtained her Ph.D. in clinical psychology (with minors in psychology-law and statistics) at The University of Alabama in 2012.  She completed a clinical-forensic postdoctoral residency at the University of Massachusetts Medical School from 2012-2013, followed by a National Science Foundation Interdisciplinary Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Nebraska Public Policy Center from 2013-2015.  

She has published one edited book and more than two dozen peer-reviewed publications in such journals as Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, Behavioral Sciences and the Law, and Criminal Justice and Behavior.  She is the recipient of the 2016 Saleem Shah Award for Early Career Excellence in Psychology and Law, co-awarded by the American Psychology-Law Society and the American Academy of Forensic Psychology, and she is the recipient of the 2016 Michelle Alexander Earely Career Award for Scholarship and Service from the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues.  She was named as a "Rising Star" in 2016 by the Association for Psychological Science, a recognition of early career scholars whose work has "already advanced the field and signals great potential for continued contributions."

She has current grant funding from several sources, including multiple NSF grants. Her research interests focus on human inference and decision making, especially by experts.  The core questions motivating her research are, “How do people reason with and integrate information to make inferences and judgments?” and “What affects people’s ability to do this well?” Consistent with the "use-inspired basic research" of Stokes' (1997) quadrant of basic and applied research, Dr. Neal studies these basic science questions in applied settings (e.g., the legal system, the scientific enterprise, healthcare and mental health systems, government) with the twin goals of discovering new understandings about how humans make decisions while also making concrete contributions to real-world problems.