Hunter Gehlbach is a Professor; Faculty Co-Director of Education for the Johns Hopkins Institute for Planetary Health; and Director of the PhD program at the Johns Hopkins School of Education. An educational psychologist by training and a social psychologist at heart, his research team integrates three main scholarly aims:
- improving the social contexts of schools (e.g., through theoretical and applied work on social perspective taking; or by identifying and mitigating biases that spark misunderstandings),
- identifying social psychological principles that enhance the effectiveness of the stories told about the environment, climate change, and Planetary Health (e.g., by leveraging the power of photographs to increase learners’ valuing of biodiversity),
- sharpening social science methodology to reduce error and improve reproducibility of results (e.g., by improving questionnaire design processes or leveraging more open science practices).
Gehlbach is an American Psychological Association Fellow of Division 15. A former high school teacher and coach, he was faculty at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (2006-2015) and UCSB (2015-2019), before joining Johns Hopkins.
Keywords: High schools; social psychology; social aspects of learning; motivation; environmental education; Planetary Health; open science; social perspective taking; survey/questionnaire research.
