POTSDAM – Lisa Legault has been promoted from associate professor to full professor of psychology and chair of psychology at Clarkson University.
Legault received her PhD in social psychology and statistics from the University of Ottawa in 2009. Her Ph.D. thesis won the Governor General’s Gold Medal. She then received a postdoctoral fellowship award from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada to conduct research on the social neuroscience of prejudice at the University of Toronto’s Work and Play Lab. She also worked in Psychological Operations for Defense Research and Development Canada before joining the Department of Psychology at Clarkson in the fall of 2012. She was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor in 2018.
At Clarkson, Legault directs the Motivation and Emotion Lab. With her students’ help, she conducts research on the role of motivation in positive social behavior. She uses behavioral, self-report, and neurophysiological indicators to understand the mechanisms involved in behavior change. Much of her recent work has examined the impact of motivational communication and messaging in promoting individual behaviors that contribute to social justice and environmental sustainability.
As a leading expert on human motivation, Legault’s research uses mixed methods, including qualitative and quantitative approaches, while also integrating insights from multiple disciplines – including neuroscience, environmental science, communications, philosophy, theology, political science, and education. She has published widely and extensively in top journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Psychological Science, and the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Her research has been funded at local, state, and federal levels. In 2018, Legault was awarded the John W. Graham Junior Faculty Research Award, and in 2022, she won the Clarkson Excellence in Research and Scholarship Award. She has presented her work at more than 70 national and international conferences, and recently gave two invited keynote lectures on leveraging motivation to solve social and environmental problems. In 2020, she won the teacher scholar award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Her work has been cited more than 4000 times and her papers on human motivation have been downloaded almost 600,000 times.

Additionally, Legault has been Executive Editor of the Journal of Social Psychology since 2021, where she has worked to promote the scientific rigor, research transparency, and international representation of the journal.
Legault teaches courses on Motivation, Social Psychology, Research Methods, and Data Analysis.
To learn more go to: https://www.lisalegault.com/.