Established in 1954, the Faculty Research Lecturer is the highest honor the UC Santa Barbara faculty can bestow on one of its members. Each year the Academic Senate recognizes one individual for their outstanding academic and creative achievements and invites them to present their work to the campus community. These lectures, which were disrupted during Covid, commemorate the accomplishments and professionalism of our distinguished colleagues.

Lectures: 4 pm - 6 pm | Light refreshments to follow

Shelly Lundberg, Economics | 2021-2022 Recipient

How Economics Discovered Women

Interest in research on the economic role of women rose during the 1970s and 80s as large numbers of women entered the labor force (and the field of economics) and as economists continued to expand their analyses beyond formal markets and into the household and the family.  Gender economics is now a substantial subfield, with new sources of data, from experiments to government administrative rosters, that give us an unprecedented ability to measure and compare the traits, behaviors, histories, and economic outcomes of men and women. At the same time, a conceptual evolution in economics is creating a more realistic economics of choice than the self-interested, independent, rational actor model of the past—based on the findings of behavioral economics that choices are not always rational, abundant evidence of social influences on behavior, and recognition of the role of culture and cultural constraints in the economy. Among the outcomes of this development has been a blurring of economics’ traditional separation of preferences and constraints and a greater openness to approaches emerging from other social sciences. Until recently, however, these innovations have had little influence on how we think about issues concerning gender and this has hampered our ability to understand important issues affecting both men and women—including the gender earnings gap, the educational underachievement of men, and declining fertility. The economic discovery of women has roughly coincided with my career in the field and in this talk, I’d like talk about what economics’ problem with gender is, where I think it comes from and some promising signs that we may be overcoming it.

BIO | Shelly Lundberg is Distinguished Professor of Economics and the Leonard Broom Professor of Demography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She received a B.A. in Economics from the University of British Columbia and a Ph.D. from Northwestern University. She held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Washington before coming to UCSB in 2011.

Lundberg’s research is focused in labor economics, demographic economics, and the economics of the family, including issues such as discrimination, inequality, family decision-making and the intra-household allocation of resources. She has studied decision-making by children, the effects of child gender on parental behavior, the location decisions of married couples, the impact of government-provided care for the elderly on the labor supply of adult children, the economic returns to psychosocial traits, and the gender gap in educational attainment. She is currently writing a book on gender economics, How Economics Discovered Women, for the University of California Press.

She is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, Fellow and past President of the Society of Labor Economists, a past President of the European Society of Population Economics and a Research Fellow at IZA. She has served the AEA in a number of positions, including as Chair of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and as Vice-President.

Richard E. Mayer, Psychological and Brain Sciences | 2020-2021 Recipient

How Meaningful Learning Works: My 50-Year Quest

For the past 50 years, Richard Mayer’s research program has been driven by a deceptively straightforward question: How can we help people learn in ways so they take what they have learned and apply it to new situations?  This question concerns the classic issue of transfer—the effects of prior learning on new learning—which has been central to both psychology and education since their beginnings more than a century ago.  In this lecture, Professor Mayer will share the fruits of his efforts to figure out how to promote meaningful learning, based on hundreds of experiments conducted by his colleagues and him. He also will present an evidence-based theory of how meaningful learning works. Specifically, he will examine three inter-related questions:  How do people learn? (i.e., the science of learning), How can we help people learn? (i.e., the science of instruction), and How can we tell what people have learned? (i.e., the science of assessment).  In short, this lecture focuses on what his research has to say about teaching for transfer. 

BIO | Richard E. Mayer is Distinguished Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research interests involve applying the science of learning to education. He served as President of Division 15 (Educational Psychology) of the American Psychological Association and Vice President of the American Educational Research Association for Division C (Learning and Instruction).  He received the E. L. Thorndike Award for career achievement in educational psychology, the Scribner Award for outstanding research in learning and instruction, the Jonassen Award for excellence in research in the field of instructional design and technology, the James McKeen Cattell Award for a lifetime of outstanding contributions to applied psychological research, the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Contribution of Applications of Psychology to Education and Training Award, and the Citizen Psychologist Citation for four decades of service as a local school board member.

He has been recognized in Contemporary Educational Psychology as the most productive educational psychologist in the world and by research.com as among the top 100 research psychologists in the world. Google Scholar lists him as the most cited educational psychologist in the world (with over 230,000 citations and an h-index of 186). He serves on the editorial boards of 12 journals mainly in educational psychology. He is the author or co-author of more than 800 publications including 35 books, such as Multimedia Learning: Third Edition, e-Learning and the Science of Instruction: Fifth Edition (with R. Clark), Learning as a Generative Activity (with L. Fiorella), Applying the Science of Learning, Computer Games for Learning, Handbook of Research on Learning and Instruction: Second Edition (co-edited with P. Alexander), and The Cambridge Handbook of Multimedia Learning: Third Edition (co-edited with L. Fiorella).   

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