David Yeager

David Yeager is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, where he co-directs the Texas Behavioral Science and Policy Institute. He is a PI of the National Study of Learning Mindsets and the Texas Mindset Initiative, and he co-founded two major scholarly networks: the Mindset Scholars Network (now the Student Experience Research Network) and the College Transition Collaborative. His research examines the causes of and solutions to adolescent health problems, such as bullying, depression, academic achievement, cheating, trust, or healthy eating. He often focuses on adolescent transitions—the transition to middle school, the transition to high school, or the transition to college—as a place where there is great opportunity (and risk) for young people’s trajectories.

Formerly, Yeager was a middle school English teacher in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Yeager holds a PhD and MA from Stanford University, and a BA and MEd from the University of Notre Dame. Yeager is a Jacobs Foundation Advanced Research Fellow, and has been a William T. Grant Foundation Scholar, a residential Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS), and a Fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In 2020, he received the Distinguished Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association, the highest honor for early career developmental psychologists.

He has received 21 other national awards since 2012, including “best paper” awards from the Behavioral Science and Policy Association, the Society for Social and Personality Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the American Educational Research Association. From 2019 to 2022, he has been a Clarivate “Highly Cited Scholar.” He is a member of the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group at the University of Chicago. He chaired and co-hosted a national summit on mindset interventions at the White House Office for Science and Technology Policy.

His work has been covered in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and more.