Stanford Psychology Podcast

Anjie chats with Dr. Nicky Sullivan, senior researcher at Impact Justice, a national non-profit innovation and research center focused on transforming the U.S. criminal justice system. Dr. Sullivan received his PhD from Stanford Psychology Department in 2024. During his PhD, he studied parents' and children's beliefs about race and racial inequality. In this episode, Nicky shares his journey from studying race in the lab to evaluating innovative initiatives like The Homecoming Project at Impact Justice. He offers practical advice for grad students on networking, while reflecting on the challenges of pursuing system reform in today’s shifting political landscape.

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Links:
Nicky’s linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicky-sullivan-phd/
Impact Justice: https://impactjustice.org/

Anjie’s website: https://anjiecao.github.io/

Podcast X @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack: https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Su chats with Dr. Steve Rathje. Dr. Rathje is an incoming Assistant Professor of Human-Computer Interaction in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is an NSF and AXA postdoctoral fellow at New York University. Steve’s work centers on the psychology of technology. He studies how core psychological phenomena like polarization, intergroup conflict, the spread of information, and mental health interact with emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and social media. Through a combination of behavioral science, computational methods, and large-scale data, his research sheds light on how our minds and our societies are being shaped in the digital age. In today's episode, we discuss his research background together with his recent review paper “The psychology of virality," in which they explore why certain content spreads rapidly online and offline, often involving a mix of emotional, social, and structural factors..

Steve’s paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2025.06.014 
Steve’s personal website: https://stevenrathje.com/ 

Su’s Twitter @sudkrc & Bluesky @sudkrc.bsky.social

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/
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Anjie chats with Dr. Ying Wong, founder and CEO of B.peachy and former cultural psychologist. Ying received her PhD in Psychology from Stanford in 2007, where she studied shame and guilt through a cultural lens. After academia, she built an impressive career across global business, and she now is the founder and CEO of B.peachy, a company dedicated to menstrual care.

In this episode, Anjie and Ying discuss Ying’s remarkable journey from academia into the business world, and how she has carried her training in social psychology into every stage of her career. They talk about what it was like to pivot into consulting and how her psychology training prepared her to build products and teams. 

If you found this episode interesting at all, subscribe on our Substack and consider leaving us a good rating! It just takes a second but helps us reach more people and get them excited about psychology.

Links:
Dr. Wong’s company B.peachy: https://bpeachy.online/
Dr. Wong’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ying-wong/

Anjie’s website: https://anjiecao.github.io/

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack: https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/

Adani chats with Dr. Susan Engel, a Senior Lecturer and Senior Faculty Fellow in Psychology at Williams College. Susan’s research spans many areas, including the development of curiosity and invention, children’s ideas, the impact of college, and school reform. In this conversation, we discuss Susan’s seminal research on children's curiosity, how curiosity develops into adulthood, and her latest book, The Intellectual Lives of Children. Susan also shares the story behind how she first started in this field of research, and the projects she’s excited to work on next.
Susan’s website: https://psychology.williams.edu/profile/sengel/
Susan’s book The Hungry Mind: https://www.amazon.com/Hungry-Mind-Origins-Curiosity-Childhood/dp/0674984110
Susan’s book The Intellectual Lives of Children: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-intellectual-lives-of-children-susan-engel/1136606329
Susan’s upcoming book American Kindergarten: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo258923309.html
Adani’s website: https://www.adaniabutto.com
Adani’s Bluesky: @adani
Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/
Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]

Su chats with Dr. Roger Levy. Dr. Levy is a Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, where he directs the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory. His research focuses on theoretical and applied questions in the processing and acquisition of natural language. His work furthers our understanding of the cognitive underpinning of language processing and acquisition, combining computational modeling, psycholinguistic experimentation, and analysis of large, naturalistic language datasets, to help design models and algorithms that will allow machines to process human language. In today's episode, we discuss his research background together with his recent work "The Science of Language in the Era of Generative AI".
Roger’s review: https://mit-genai.pubpub.org/pub/ak3evnmm/release/1 
Roger’s lab website: http://cpl.mit.edu/  
Roger’s personal website: https://www.mit.edu/~rplevy/ 

Su’s Twitter: https://x.com/sudkrc 

Podcast Twitter @StanfordPsyPod
Podcast Substack https://stanfordpsypod.substack.com/
Let us know what you thought of this episode, or of the podcast! :) [email protected]