Mary Murphy

Mary C. Murphy is the founding Director of the CASBS Summer Institute on Diversity. She will spend the year fundraising, developing, and leading the Institute. The CASBS Summer Institute engages in field building around social scientific investigation of when, how, and why difference makes a difference and will develop an on-going collaboration and support network of early career and established scholars from backgrounds underrepresented across the social and behavioral sciences. Murphy will also publish a book, Cultures of Growth (Simon & Schuster, 2024) that describes her 10 years of research on reconstruing mindset as a cultural feature of mainstream settings such as organizational and educational settings. She shows how these organizational mindsets shape people’s motivation, engagement, behavior, and performance; companies’ and schools’ culture and organizational performance; and the diversity, equity, and inclusion of organizational and educational settings. Murphy is the Herman B. Wells Endowed Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at Indiana University. She is the founder of the Equity Accelerator, the nation’s first focused-research organization (FRO) focused on harnessing the social and behavioral sciences to create and sustain more equitable learning and working environments—from college through careers. In the area of organizations and tech, her research examines barriers and solutions for increasing gender and racial diversity and inclusion in STEM fields. Murphy has published more than 100 articles that have shaped several fields. In 2019, Murphy was awarded the 2019 Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), the highest award bestowed on early career scholars by the U.S. Government. Murphy was a fellow in 2015-16 and is a research affiliate in 2023-24.