Jennifer Lerner Headshot

Jennifer Lerner, PhD, MA

Dr. Jennifer Lerner is the Thornton F. Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School and Co-Founder of the Harvard Decision Science Laboratory. She also holds appointments in Harvard’s Department of Psychology and Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences. In addition to her roles at Harvard, Professor Lerner serves as Special Advisor to the US Chief of Naval Operations and as the Navy’s first Chief Decision Scientist. Dr. Lerner’s research examines human judgment and decision making. She also examines the mechanisms through which accountability and other authority systems shape judgment and choice outcomes, as well as the causes and consequences of stress

Dr. Lerner earned her PhD in Psychology from the University of California, Berkeley. After a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral fellowship at UCLA, she joined the Carnegie Mellon University faculty.