Colloquium Series

Fall 2026 IPSR Colloquium Series

All talks will be held on Wednesdays from 12:10 PM to 1:30 PM in Room 1102, 2121 Berkeley Way, unless otherwise noted.

  • August 26, 2026 – Gül Dölen, Professor and the Bob & Renee Parsons Endowed Chair, Department of Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California, Berkeley; Adjunct Professor of Neuroscience and Neurology, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Psychedelic Mediated Reopening of Critical Periods: Basic Mechanisms and Therapeutic Opportunities.
  • September 2, 2026 – Alex Tamkin, Member of Technical Staff, Anthropic. How People Use AI, and What It Does to Learning and Judgment.
  • September 9, 2026 – Shigehiro Oishi, Marshall Field IV Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Chicago; 2026-27 Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), Stanford University. Specialization and Its Discontent: Implications for Curiosity and Well-Being.
  • September 16, 2026 – IPSR Postdoctoral Talks:
    • Matthew V. Elliott, Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. Experiential and Physiological Measures of Emotion Distancing in Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors.
    • Ariana Andrea Castro Leon, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. Emotion and Reasoning in Mania: Effects of Internal and External Emotion on Analogical Reasoning.
    • Nathalia Carvalho, Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley; Assistant Professor, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Psychology Department. The Effects of Individual and Shared Awe on Romantic Relationships.
  • September 23, 2026 – J. David Creswell, William S. Dietrich II Professor in Psychology and Neuroscience, Carnegie Mellon University. Allostatic Lift: When Stress Makes Us Stronger.
  • September 30, 2026 – Kristin Pauker, Professor of Psychology, University of Hawai'i at Manoa. Cultural Snapshots and Cultural Transmission of Bias.
  • October 7, 2026 – Social Personality Brownbag. (Graduate student research talks.)
  • October 14, 2026 – Jasmin Brooks Stephens, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. Reimagining Suicide Prevention for Black Youth: Advancing Upstream and Strengths-Based Approaches.
  • October 21, 2026 – Panel: Minds in the Loop: Psychology and AI Alignment.
    • Brad Knox, Research Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin. Building Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) Around Psychological Models of Human Preference.
    • Brian Christian, Research Fellow, Center for Human-Compatible AI, University of California Berkeley. Reward Models Are Not Blank Slates, and LLMs Can't Un-Know: Cognitive Science at Two Steps of the Alignment Pipeline.
    • Marjan Sharifi, Visiting Scholar, Institute of Personality and Social Research, University of California, Berkeley. Reimagining Alignment Through Insights from Human Creative Processes.
    • Moderator: Bill Thompson, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley.
  • October 28, 2026 – Social Personality Brownbag. (Graduate student research talks.)
  • November 4, 2026 – Psychophysiology and eye tracking workshop with Robert W. Levenson, Professor Emeritus of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley. Details to be announced.
  • SPECIAL EVENT November 6-7, 2026 – Tenth annual “New Directions in Research on the Psychology of Technology,” co-organized by IPSR faculty Juliana Schroeder and Don Moore and co-sponsored by IPSR. Theme is "AI and the Future of Meaning." Location: UC Berkeley Haas School of Business. Register here.
  • November 11, 2026 – Veterans Day--no colloquium.
  • November 18, 2026 – June Gruber, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado Boulder. Paradoxes of Positivity: The Complex Role of Positive Emotion in Mental Health and Psychopathology.
  • November 25, 2026 – Non-Instructional Day--no colloquium.
  • December 2, 2026 – Nicole Holliday, Associate Professor of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley. AI as the Language Police: Linguistic Surveillance and the Problem of Idealized Speech.
  • December 9, 2026 – Julia Minson, Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Is Receptiveness to Opposing Views Persuasive? Reconciling the Evidence.