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Lora Park
Principal Investigator

Lora Park was born in Taegu, South Korea and moved to the U.S. when she was 4 years old. Her first 14 years in the U.S. were spent in Amherst, New York, where her parents attended graduate school at the University at Buffalo. Her family then moved to Seattle, Washington, where she attended high school and graduated with a B.S. degree in psychology at the University of Washington in 2000. Her honors thesis, with Dr. Anthony Greenwald and Kathleen Cook, examined how implicit attitudes and stereotypes affect women’s persistence in math, science, and engineering.

From 2000-2005, Lora was a graduate student in social psychology at the University of Michigan. There, she worked with Jenny Crocker on research pertaining to self-threats, contingencies of self-worth, and the costs of pursuing self-esteem. Lora received her Ph.D. in social psychology in 2005 and moved to Buffalo, New York, where she is currently an assistant professor at the University at Buffalo in the social psychology area. Her research examines how self-esteem, contingencies of self-worth, and appearance-based rejection sensitivity interact with self-threats to affect outcomes such as motivation, affect, and mental and physical health. In her spare time, Lora enjoys traveling, spending time with her husband, family, and friends, playing piano, dancing, and singing in the Buffalo Philharmonic Chorus.