LISA ASPINWALL

Dr. Lisa G. Aspinwall is Professor and former Chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Utah and a member of the Cancer Control and Population Sciences program at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. She received her B.A. with honors and with distinction from Stanford University, and her Ph.D. from UCLA.

A social and health psychologist, she examines self-regulatory processes and future-oriented thinking as people seek to understand and prevent potential negative outcomes, especially in the domain of health. Most recently, she has examined these processes in the areas of predictive genetic testing for familial cancer and severe obesity.

She is a fellow of American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Society of Experimental Social Psychology, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Society for Health Psychology, and she has received grants from the National Science Foundation, the National Cancer Institute, and the NIH-funded Utah Center for Excellence in ELSI Research (UCEER). She has served on the editorial boards of Psychology and Health, Psychological Science, Motivation and Emotion, and other journals. 

Dr. Aspinwall has co-founded and continues to direct two professional organizations open to all to foster professional development and community for underrepresented scholars, the GLBTQ Alliance in Social and Personality Psychology (GASP) and the Disability Advocacy and Research Network (DARN, https://darndisability.org/). She is also an active participant in faculty mentorship programs on campus (VPCAT, S.T.A.R.S. Faculty Fellows program, Utah Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI), CTSI K12 program).

She is the winner of the Firestone Metal for Excellence in Research from Stanford University, the Sigma Xi Outstanding Graduate Science Student Award from UCLA, a Templeton Positive Psychology Prize from the American Psychological Association, two teaching awards (University of Maryland, University of Utah), and the Irwin Altman Outstanding Psychology Faculty Award, University of Utah. She remains grateful for the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship and the NIMH Health Psychology Research Traineeship she received to support her doctoral studies.