Sian Beilock

Sian Leah Beilock (/ˈsiən ˈbaɪlɒk/ SEE-ən BY-lok; born January 10, 1976) is an American cognitive scientist who is the president of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire. Before Dartmouth, she was the president of Barnard College in Manhattan, New York. She was previously the Stella M. Rowley Professor of Psychology and executive vice provost at the University of Chicago.

Beilock was born in Berkeley, California to two lawyers, in a Jewish household. She was named after Welsh actress Siân Phillips, whom her parents had seen as a suffragette in the BBC miniseries Shoulder to Shoulder; her parents did not know how the name was pronounced and the pronunciation of her name differs to how it is pronounced in Wales.

Beilock attended a private school until second grade, when she opted to move to public school. She played several sports at Piedmont High School and excelled in soccer, but when she was 16 she played a poor game as a goalkeeper in front of coaches from the national team, and never played again. She often mentioned this experience in her research on pressure "Being able to pivot and not get bogged down in something going wrong—that’s such an important skill." Beilock wanted to attend university on the East coast, but remained in California due to her father's leukemia diagnosis.

As of 2023, Beilock had one daughter with her long-term partner.

Beilock graduated from the University of California, San Diego in 1997 with a B.S. in cognitive science and a minor in psychology. She received her M.S. and Ph.D. in kinesiology and psychology from Michigan State University in East Lansing in 2003. Her dissertation was titled When Performance Fails: Expertise, Attention, and Performance Under Pressure. Her doctoral advisors were Thomas H. Carr and Deborah Feltz.

During her Ph.D. research and afterwards, Beilock explored differences between novice and expert athletic performances. Later in her career, her research focused on why people perform poorly in stressful academic situations, such as taking a high-stakes mathematics exam. She found that worries during those situations rob individuals of the working memory or cognitive horsepower they would normally have to focus. Because people who have additional working memory rely more on their brainpower, they can be affected to a greater extent in stressful academic situations. Her work demonstrated that stressful situations during tests might diminish meaningful differences between students that under less stressful situations might exhibit greater differences in performance.

Beilock's research also relates to educational practice and policy. Her work found that students' attitudes and anxieties and those of their teachers are critical to student success. She has developed simple psychological interventions to help people perform their best under stress.

From 2003 to 2005, Beilock was an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. She was on the faculty at the University of Chicago from 2005 until 2017, where she became the Stella M. Rowley Professor of Psychology and Executive Vice Provost.^[5]