Jon Freeman is Associate Professor of Psychology at Columbia University and director of the Social Cognitive & Neural Sciences Lab. His research examines how people understand the social world through a coordination of visual, social, and affective processes. In particular, his work focuses on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying person perception, bias and stereotyping, and the real-time formation and dynamics of social and emotional judgments, including the interplay between social cognition and visual perception. He takes an integrative and multi-level approach that makes use of techniques such as functional neuroimaging, computational modeling, and behavioral paradigms. He is also the developer of the data collection and analysis software, MouseTracker, which uses response-directed hand motion to uncover split-second decision-making.
Freeman is the recipient of a number of awards, including the National Science Foundation CAREER Award, the Association for Psychological Science’s Janet T. Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, and early career awards from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral & Brain Sciences, the Social & Affective Neuroscience Society, the Society for Personality & Social Psychology, the International Social Cognition Network, and the Society for Social Neuroscience.
STEM Diversity and Data Equity Work
Freeman's advocacy work is focused on resolving blind spots in U.S. STEM diversity efforts, particularly LGBTQ+ disparities in STEM. Since 2018, he has been working to have sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) demographics incorporated into the U.S. government’s national data collection and reporting systems for the STEM workforce that are used to ensure the equity and inclusion of underrepresented groups in STEM, all while maintaining appropriate privacy and confidentiality standards. In collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), he has recently begun extending this work to institutions of higher education as well. By catalyzing SOGI data infrastructures at the national level with federal data collection and at U.S. academic institutions, this work seeks to create transformative change through data-driven policies and solutions that can enable the success of all people in STEM.
