Leslie Jennings Rowley, PhD is a Lecturer in Public Policy and First Year Seminars at Princeton University and the Associate Director of the Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy. In addition to teaching multidisciplinary courses grounded in behavioral science, she executes the Center’s mission and programmatic objectives while developing interdisciplinary initiatives and cultivating research collaborations both internal and external to Princeton. As a social psychologist, her early research centered on the impact of narrative media on measures of adolescent self-identity, self-construal, and national identity. Currently, she is investigating how individuals and Western society as a whole approach the idea of endings and what behavioral insights may lend to their reimagining. She sits on the governing board of the Behavioral Science and Policy Association and is the secretary of the board of Compassion & Choices, the largest end of life options advocacy and education organization in the U.S. She also founded Hereafter Partners, an organization that aims to make conversations about death, dying, and aging more normalized and accessible for younger cohorts of society.
A graduate of Dartmouth College with an AB in Economics and Geography, she earned an MBA in international business and a PhD in psychology with an emphasis on media. Beyond the academy, her career has spanned the creative arts, global educational travel, international corporate responsibility, and higher education leadership. She has worked in an opera house, the White House, a sailboat belonging to a cereal heiress, and a Modernist design icon. A lover of music of all kinds, she is a budding songwriter in her own right. She lives in Princeton with her husband and their two teenagers.
