Dr. Valerie Jones Taylor is an Assistant Professor of Psychology and Africana Studies at Lehigh University. She earned a doctorate in social psychology at Stanford University and a B.A. in psychology and ethnic studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Before joining Lehigh’s faculty, Taylor served as an assistant professor at Spelman College and was a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University. Her research areas include intergroup relations, social identity threat, stereotyping and discrimination, and cultural psychology. Specifically, she investigates how stereotyping and prejudice affect the academic performance of underrepresented groups, interracial interactions, and the treatment of racialized physical spaces. Her work also examines ways to mitigate the adverse effects of stereotyping in interracial encounters in academic and social contexts using virtual reality. She has been awarded grants from the National Science Foundation and the Ford Foundation, and published and presented her work widely.