Kathleen D. Vohs is an associate professor of marketing at the Carlson School of Management of the University of Minnesota who has recently been named the Land O’ Lakes Professor of Excellence in Marketing. Her research is concerned with the psychological effects of being reminded of money, self-regulation (particularly in regard to impulsive spending and eating), making choices, the fear and feeling of being duped, and self-escape behaviors. A summa cum laude graduate of Gustavus Adolphus College in Minnesota, she earned her Ph.D. in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College in 2000. After postdoctoral fellowships at Case Western Reserve University and the University of Utah, she joined the faculty of the Sauder School of Business at the University of British Columbia in 2003 as an assistant professor of marketing and the holder of the Canada Research Chair in Marketing Science and Consumer Psychology. She accepted her present position in 2005. In 2007, Vohs was named a McKnight Land-Grant Professor, which is the most significant and most competitive university-wide award available to a junior faculty member at the University of Minnesota. In 2009, Vohs was named a a McKnight Presidential Fellow, a highly-select university-wide honor for the most productive associate professors.

Dr. Vohs has been a summer scholar at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University and was the recipient of Dartmouth’s Hannah T. Croasdale Graduate Study Award, as well as a MENSA Award for Research in Excellence, and the SAGE Young Scholars Award given by Sage Publications and the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology. Most recently, she was given the Early Career Award by the Society of Self and Identity. Her research has been supported by National Institutes of Mental Health, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, the University of Minnesota, Association for Consumer Research Funding, American Cancer Society, National Institutes of Drug Abuse, and most recently John Templeton Foundation.

She formerly served on the editorial board of the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin and currently serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Psychological Science, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Compass, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. The author of nearly 150 articles published in scholarly journals or chapters in volumes of collected works, she is the co-editor (with Roy F. Baumeister) of Sage’s 2007 Encyclopedia of Social Psychology and the co-editor of three books, including (with Eli Finkel), Self and Relationships, (with Roy F. Baumeister and George F. Loewenstein), Do Emotions Help or Hurt Decision Making? A Hedgefoxian Perspective, which was published in 2008 by the Russell Sage Foundation. Her two most recent books are (with Roy F. Baumeister and Alfred Mele) Free Will and Consciousness: How Might They Work? and (with Roy F. Baumeister), Handbook of Self-Regulation: Research, Theory, and Practice (2nd edition).