Vice Provost Geraldine Downey

            Dr. Geraldine Downey is the Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives.  The Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives works to implement the university's diversity mission statement and in particular leads efforts to increase the diversity of Columbia's faculty, administration, and officers of research. Working with a Presidential Advisory Committee on Diversity, the Vice Provost coordinates activities across all schools within the university aimed at increasing the identification, recruitment, and retention of a diverse group of outstanding faculty, administrators, and officers of research, especially those historically under-represented in American higher education. The office also works to build pipelines that will substantially increase the representation of such groups in the University's undergraduate and graduate populations and to create policies and programs that will enhance the work-life experience of all members of the University community.
            In her role as vice provost, Vice Provost Downey plans to give special attention to the question of diversity in the sciences—an issue of national concern and one in which Columbia can become a national leader. She will also continue current efforts to advance diversity generally in the arts and sciences and in the professional schools.
            Vice Provost Downey is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and was formerly chair of the Department. As professor and former department chair, she has extensive experience in faculty recruitment and development. She also serves as director of Columbia’s Social Relations Laboratory.
            Her primary research area is the study of personal and status based rejection. Trained as a developmental psychologist, she has conducted extensive research on rejection sensitivity in the context of interpersonal relationships and in institutional settings such as schools. This line of work has led her to study sensitivity to rejection based on personal, unique characteristics, as well as sensitivity to rejection based on group characteristics such as race and gender. She has sought to investigate the effect of rejection sensitivity on people's behavior by utilizing various techniques including established social cognition paradigms, experimental studies, physiological recordings, brain-imaging and diary studies. Vice Provost Downey’s research has been funded by the National Institute of Mental Health and the Russell Sage Foundation. Her scholarship has been published in a number of leading scholarly journals, including Psychological Science, Child Development, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.