Tess Neal

Tess M.S. Neal, PhD is an associate professor and Dean's Professor of Psychology at Iowa State University. Before moving to Iowa in Fall 2023, she was tenured at ASU, where she was the founding director of the Future of Forensic Science Initiative, a precursor to the new School of Interdisciplinary Forensics. She also served as a co-founder of ASU’s Law and Behavioral Science group and as the principal investigator of the Clinical and Legal Judgment Lab.

She is a scientist; a licensed clinical psychologist trained to assess, diagnose, and treat mental and behavioral disorders; and a forensic psychologist trained to bring psychology into legal contexts. She studies the nature and limits of expertise. Her basic work focuses on understanding and improving human judgment processes – especially among trained experts, and her more applied work focuses on improving forensic and legal experts’ judgments in particular.

Her work has been funded by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation, and she has published more than four dozen scientific papers. As of January 1, 2024, she is the incoming Editor-in-Chief of the journal Psychology, Public Policy, and Law. She is a fellow of both the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association. In 2022, she completed a Fulbright Scholarship in Australia.