Wendy Berry Mendes is the Charles C. & Dorathea S. Dilley Professor of Psychology at Yale University. She was previously the Sarlo/Ekman Professor of Emotion at University of California, San Francisco, United States and prior to that position was the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of Social Sciences at Harvard University. Her expertise is in the area of emotion, intergroup relationships, stigma and psychophysiology. At Yale she is the founder and director of the Emotion, Health, and Psychophysiology Lab in the Department of Psychology.
Mendes joined the faculty of Harvard in 2004 as an assistant professor of psychology and was promoted to associate professor in 2008. She was a core faculty member of the Robert Wood Johnson Health and Society Scholars program which is run by the Harvard School of Public Health, and in 2010 she moved to UC San Francisco. At UCSF she was the Director of the Health Psychology Program and Deputy Vice Chair of Psychiatry. In the fall of 2023, she started her current position at Yale University in the Psychology Department.
In 2008 Mendes won the Gordon Allport prize for best paper on intergroup relations from SPSSI, in 2009 she won the Sage Young Scholar Award awarded by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, in 2011 she won the Janet Taylor Spence award from APS for early transformative careers awarded by the Association for Psychological Science, in 2020 she was awarded the Career Trajectory Award by the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and for five consecutive years (2006–2010) she was named one of Harvard undergraduates favorite Professors.
Personal life
Mendes (then Wendy Berry) was Miss California in 1989. She is married to Michael Mendes and they have one daughter, Blair.[4][5][6]
^Blascovich, J., Mendes, W. B., Vanman, E., & Dickerson, S. (2011). Social Psychophysiology for Social and Personality Psychology. Los Angeles:Sage
^Blascovich, J., & Mendes, W. B. (2010). Social psychophysiology and embodiment. In S. T. Fiske, D. T. Gilbert & G. Lindzey (Eds.), The handbook of social psychology, 5th ed. (pp. 194-227). New York: Wiley.