Sian Beilock
Sian Leah Beilock is the 19th president of Dartmouth. She is the first woman to have been elected president of Dartmouth by the Board of Trustees and began her tenure on June 12, 2023.
Beilock previously served as the eighth president of Barnard College at Columbia University. During her tenure at Barnard, Beilock enhanced STEM research and teaching programs to parallel the college's renown in the arts and humanities; implemented Feel Well, Do Well, a campus-wide health and wellness initiative; led Barnard to record fundraising; increased applications for admission; and increased diversity among students, faculty, and staff. Almost half of Barnard students identify as women of color.
Before joining Barnard, Beilock spent 12 years at the University of Chicago, where she was the executive vice provost, serving as an officer of the university, and the Stella M. Rowley Professor of Psychology.
Beilock is one of the world's leading experts on the brain science behind "choking under pressure" in business, education, and sports. In the last several years, her research has focused specifically on success in math and science for women and girls and on how performance anxiety can either be exacerbated or alleviated by teachers, parents, and peers.
She is also the author of the critically acclaimed books "Choke" and "How the Body Knows Its Mind," which have been published in more than a dozen languages, and she has published 120 peer-reviewed scientific papers. Beilock works closely with individuals, Fortune 500 companies, sports teams, and government organizations to help them build high-performance teams and use research-driven strategies to create environments that attract, retain, and get the best out of their talent.
Primary Interests:
- Applied Social Psychology
- Emotion, Mood, Affect
- Gender Psychology
- Group Processes
- Motivation, Goal Setting
- Person Perception
- Prejudice and Stereotyping
- Social Cognition
Research Group or Laboratory:
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Image Gallery
Video Gallery
Why We Choke Under Pressure—and How to Avoid It
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15:14 Why We Choke Under Pressure—and How to Avoid It
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57:20 Only 1% of People Understand This About Success
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57:18 Leveraging Mind and Body to Perform Your Best Under Stress
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14:42 The Science of "Choking"
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3:21 Introducing Barnard College President
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3:57 Meet the Next Dartmouth President
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51:55 Performing at Your Best Under Stress
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16:49 Brain Teasers: Cracking the Mind's Toughest Riddles
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2:01 On Athletes, Choking, and the Olympics
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2:10 Do You Choke at Times When You Shouldn't?
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58:34 Human Performance, Failure, and Growth
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1:42 Using Bodies and Brains to Learn Science
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37:58 The Science of Performing Under Pressure
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58:57 Performing Your Best Under Stress
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1:01 Tips for Performing Well Under High Stress
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57:23 Performance Under Stress and Math Anxiety
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Books:
- Beilock, S. (2015). How the body knows its mind: The surprising power of the physical environment to influence how you think and feel (reprint ed.). New York: Atria Books.
- Beilock, S. L. (2010). Choke: What the secrets of the brain reveal about getting it right when you have to. New York: Free Press.
Journal Articles:
- Beilock, S. L. (2008). Math performance in stressful situations. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 339-343
- Beilock, S. L., Bertenthal, B. I., McCoy, A. M., & Carr, T. H. (2004). Haste does not always make waste: Expertise, direction of attention, and speed versus accuracy in performing sensorimotor skills. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 11, 373-379.
- Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2005). When high-powered people fail: Working memory and "choking under pressure" in math. Psychological Science, 16, 101-105.
- Beilock, S. L., & Carr, T. H. (2001). On the fragility of skilled performance: What governs choking under pressure? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 701-725.
- Beilock, S. L., Carr, T. H., MacMahon, C., & Starkes, J. L. (2002). When paying attention becomes counterproductive: Impact of divided versus skill-focused attention on novice and experienced performance of sensorimotor skills. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 8, 6-16.
- Beilock, S. L., Gunderson, E. A., Ramirez, G., & Levine, S. C. (2010). Female teachers' math anxiety affects girls' math achievement. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 107(5), 1060-1063.
- Beilock, S. L., & Holt, L. E. (2007). Embodied preference judgments: Can likeability be driven by the motor system? Psychological Science, 18, 51-57.
- Beilock, S. L., Jellison, W. A., Rydell, R. J., McConnell, A. R., & Carr, T. H. (2006). On the causal mechanisms of stereotype threat: Can skills that don't rely heavily on working memory still be threatened? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 38, 1059-1071.
- Beilock, S. L., Lyons, I. M., Mattarella-Micke, A., Nusbaum, H. C., & Small, S. L. (2008). Sports experience changes the neural processing of action language. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 105, 13269-13273.
- Beilock, S. L., Rydell, R. J., & McConnell, A. R. (2007). Stereotype threat and working memory: Mechanisms, alleviation, and spillover. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 136, 256-276.
- Choe, K. W., Jenifer, J. B., Rozek, C. S., Berman, M. G., & Beilock, S. L. (2019). Calculated avoidance: Math anxiety predicts math avoidance in effort-based decision-making. Science Advances, 5(11), eaay1062.
- Holt, L. E., & Beilock, S. L. (2006). Expertise and its embodiment: Examining the impact of sensorimotor skill expertise on the representation of action-related text. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 13, 694-701.
- Jenifer, J. B., Rozek, C. S., Levine, S. C., & Beilock, S. L. (2022). Effort(less) exam preparation: Math anxiety predicts the avoidance of effortful study strategies. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(10), 2534-2541.
- Lyons, I., & Beilock, S. L. (2009). Beyond quantity: Individual differences in working memory and the ordinal understanding of numerical symbols. Cognition, 113, 189-204.
- Lyons, I., Cieslak, M., Mattarella-Micke, A., Nusbaum, H., Small, S., & Beilock, S. L. (2010). The role of personal experience in the neural processing of action-related language. Brain and Language, 112, 214-222.
- Pantoja, N., Schaeffer, M. W., Rozek, C. S., Beilock, S. L., & Levine, S. C. (2020). Children's math anxiety predicts their math achievement over and above a key foundational math skill. Journal of Cognition and Development, 21(5), 709-728.
- Rozek, C. S., Ramirez, G., Fine, R. D., & Beilock, S. L. (2019). Reducing socioeconomic disparities in the STEM pipeline through student emotion regulation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(5), 1553-1558.
- Schaeffer, M. W., Rozek, C. S., Maloney, E. A., Berkowitz, T., Levine, S. C., & Beilock, S. L. (2021). Elementary school teachers’ math anxiety and students’ math learning: A large‐scale replication. Developmental Science, 24, e13080.
- Yang, S., Gallo, D., & Beilock, S. L. (2009). Embodied memory judgments: A case of motor fluency. Journal of Experiment Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 35, 1359-1365.
Courses Taught:
- Cognitive Psychology
- Embodied Cognition
- The Mind
Sian Beilock
Office of the President
Parkhurst Hall, Dartmouth College
14 North Main Street
Hanover, New Hampshire 03755
United States of America
- Phone: (603) 646-2223
- Fax: (603) 646-8264
