Wendy Wood, Ph.D.
Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California
Wendy Wood, Ph.D. is Provost Professor of Psychology and Business at the University of Southern California. Wood is a social psychologist, and her research addresses the ways that habits guide behavior—and why they are so difficult to break, as well as evolutionary models of gender differences in behavior. Her research has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, and NPR. She is the author of the 2019 book Good Habits, Bad Habits: The Science of Making Positive Changes that Stick.
From 1982 until 2003, Wood was at Texas A&M University, where she was the Ella C. McFadden Professor of Liberal Arts. At Texas A&M, she also served as the Associate Vice President for Research and the Director of the Women’s Faculty Mentoring Program. She received a teaching award from the undergraduate honors program and a distinguished faculty research award. In 2004, she moved to Duke University as James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Professor of Marketing. At Duke, Dr. Wood served as Co-Director of the Social Science Research Institute. While Co-Director, she also helped to found the National Consortium of Interdisciplinary Social Science Institutes.
Dr. Wood is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 8), the American Psychological Society, a Fellow of the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and founding member of the Society for Research Synthesis Methodology. She was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. Currently, she is Associate Editor of Psychological Review, and in the past she has been Associate Editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, and Personality and Social Psychology Review. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Mental Health, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study.
She received her B.S. from the University of Illinois and her M.A. and Ph.D. (in 1980) in psychology from the University of Massachusetts.
