Sian Beilock

Sian Leah Beilock (born January 10, 1976) is an American cognitive scientist who is the president of Dartmouth College. Previous to serving at Dartmouth College, Beilock was the president of Barnard College. Beilock spent 12 years at the University of Chicago, departing Chicago as the Stella M. Rowley Professor of Psychology and Executive Vice Provost.

Education
Beilock graduated from the University of California, San Diego with a B.S. in cognitive science and a minor in psychology. She was awarded a Ph.D. from Michigan State University in 2003.

Career
During and subsequent to her Ph.D. research, Beilock explored differences between novice and expert athletic performances. Later in her career, Beilock's research focused on why people perform poorly in stressful academic situations, such as taking a high-stakes mathematics exam. Beilock found that worries during those situations rob individuals of the working memory or cognitive horsepower they would normally have to focus. Because people with more working memory rely on their brainpower more, they can be affected to a greater extent in stressful academic situations. Beilock's work demonstrated that stressful situations during tests might diminish meaningful differences between students that under less stressful situations might exhibit greater differences in performance. Beilock's research also relates to educational practice and policy. Her work found that students' attitudes and anxieties as well as those of their teachers are critical to student success. In her work, she has developed simple psychological interventions to help people perform their best under stress.

From 2003 to 2005, Beilock was an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Miami University. She was on the faculty at the University of Chicago from 2005 until 2017, where she was the Stella M. Rowley Professor of Psychology and Executive Vice Provost.[5] On July 1, 2017, she became the 8th president of Barnard College.

Dartmouth College president
Beilock became the first woman to lead Dartmouth College, beginning her tenure as president on June 12, 2023. Beilock stated her focus is on improving student mental health and fostering free speech and open dialogue on campus. She has faced a tumultuous start as the result of several high profile incidents, including the October arrests of two student protestors and free-speech concerns around monitoring of student communications early in her tenure.

In May 2024, Beilock ordered the arrest of approximately 90 students and faculty members who were nonviolently protesting the Israel-Hamas War, who were taken into custody by the New Hampshire State Police. A week later, Beilock stood by her decision "to ask the Hanover Police Department for help taking down the encampment" but noted she was "sorry for the harm this impossible decision has caused." On May 15, 2024, Dartmouth's undergraduate student body voted no confidence in Beilock. On May 20, 2024, Beilock was censured by a vote of 183 to 163 by the Dartmouth Faculty of Arts and Sciences over her response to the May 1 campus protest. This marked the first time a Dartmouth president was ever censured.

Works

 * Beilock, S. L. (2010). Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal about Getting It Right When You Have To. Simon & Schuster: Free Press.
 * Beilock, S. L. (2015). How the Body Knows Its Mind: The Surprising Power of the Physical Environment to Influence How You Think and Feel. Simon & Schuster: Atria Books.