Chair's Message

Welcome to all of you who received an undergraduate or graduate degree within the Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UCSB. Alumni typically remember their experiences here with great appreciation and nostalgia. We hope to establish and maintain continuing contact with you over the years. In that way, we can let you know what’s new in the department, and find out about what’s new with our alumni.

The Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara is dedicated to excellence in research, teaching, and public service. Our award winning faculty offer vigorous undergraduate and graduate educational programs and carry out leading edge research in several core areas of psychology including cognitive neuroscience, cognition and the perceptual sciences, developmental and evolutionary psychology, neuroscience and behavior, and social psychology. Our thousands of undergraduate and hundreds of graduate alumni are represented in a wide variety of academic, professional, business, service, and educational settings.

Although we are a relatively small department (31 faculty members at this writing), we compete nationally with other top flight undergraduate and graduate programs. The multidisciplinary interests of our faculty and graduate students form the basis of exciting new research collaborations with a variety of other disciplines, including anthropology, the biological sciences, communication, computer science, education, geography, linguistics, and religious studies. In addition we now have four major, nationally-known centers:

Simply put, the quality of our faculty, our staff, and our students help rank UCSB’s Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences among the best in the nation. Our alumni reflect and magnify those strengths and we welcome your continued connection to the UCSB Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences.

Many of you have expressed interest in maintaining contact by learning what’s new in UCSB’s Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, and what’s going on with classmates. To do so you can subscribe to our email list and/or be put on our mailing list to receive copies of our annual newsletter: Inside Psychology. Email list subscription information and newsletter information can be found below.

Shelly Gable
Professor and Chair