MarYam Hamedani Ph.D.

MarYam Hamedani, Ph.D., is Executive Director and Senior Research Scientist at Stanford SPARQ, a behavioral science “do tank” at Stanford University, where academic researchers and public and private sector leaders work together for positive change. A social psychologist by training, she has spent her career leading centers and teams in higher ed focused on social problems and social impact. Her expertise is in harnessing the power of culture to support organizational and societal change and disrupting cultural defaults that lead to bias and inequality.

Hamedani’s research has been published in peer-reviewed journals including American Psychologist, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Psychological Science, and supported by leading foundations. Her work has also been featured in national media outlets such as The New York Times, National Public Radio, ABC News, The Atlantic, and Salon.com, and she has written for Harvard Business Review, Stanford Social Innovation Review, Inside Higher Ed, Education Week, and more. Hamedani also regularly speaks and advises on how social-science insights about culture and inequality can support and drive strategies for change. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

Hamedani was previously the Associate Director of Stanford’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity and the Associate Director of Stanford's Center for Opportunity Policy in Education. She graduated from Middlebury College (B.A. in Psychology and B.A. in Philosophy, summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) and Stanford University (Ph.D. in Psychology).