MICHELE GELFAND is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, College Park. Gelfand uses field, experimental, computational, and neuroscience methods to understand the evolution of culture—as well as its multilevel consequences for human groups. Her work has been cited over 20,000 times in the press, including in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, and Science, and on NPR.
She is the author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire the World and co-editor of the following books: Values, Political Action, and Change in the Middle East and the Arab Spring (Oxford University Press, 2017); The Handbook of Conflict and Conflict Management (Taylor & Francis, 2013); and The Handbook of Negotiation and Culture (2004, Stanford University Press). Additionally, she is the founding co-editor of the Advances in Culture and Psychology annual series and the Frontiers of Culture and Psychology series (Oxford University Press). She is the past President of the International Association for Conflict Management, past Division Chair of the Conflict Division of the Academy of Management, and past Treasurer of the International Association for Cross-Cultural Psychology. She has received several awards, such as the 2017 Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association, the 2016 Diener Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Annaliese Research Award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.
A native New Yorker, Michele currently lives in University Park, Maryland with her husband, two daughters, and her dog, Pepper.