Suparna Rajaram, Ph.D.

Suparna Rajaram received her B.A. from Mount Carmel College (Bengaluru, India), earning the sixth rank out of the top ten awarded to the highest scoring students from among approximately 30,000. Rajaram then received her M.A. from Bangalore University (Bengaluru, India) where she was a recipient of the National Merit Scholarship. She then moved to Purdue University where she received her M.S. in Cognitive Psychology, and then to Rice University where she was awarded the Rice University Fellowship and received her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology. Rajaram next completed a postdoctoral fellowship in Cognitive Neuroscience at Temple University School of Medicine. During this period, she received a Fetzer Foundation Fellowship from the Carnegie Mellon Symposium Series. 

Rajaram next joined Stony Brook University as an Assistant Professor of Psychology, received early tenure and promotion to Associate Professor, and then became Full Professor of Psychology.  Rajaram has served as the Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Psychology (2018-2019). She also has been Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs in the College of Arts and Sciences at Stony Brook University (2012-2015) that has about 500 tenure-track and tenured faculty members and about 100 lecturers in the College, overseeing process and policies concerning tenure, promotion, mentoring, and related faculty matters. 

Rajaram now holds the rank of SUNY Distinguished Professor. In 2018,  she became the first woman in the history of the psychology department to be appointed Distinguished Professor, the highest academic rank and system tribute conferred upon SUNY faculty by the State University Board of Trustees to recognize national and international research prominence.  

Rajaram’s awards include being named a 2022 Guggenheim fellow in recognition of her research and scholarship, and the inaugural Psychonomic Society Clifford T. Morgan Distinguished Leadership Award (2019) given to individuals “for their significant contributions to the field of cognitive psychology” and “sustained leadership and service to the discipline.”  In 2018, Rajaram received the Visiting Scholar CLASS Award (Center for Liberal Arts and Social Sciences) from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In 2025, Rajaram received the Provost’s Outstanding Mentor Award at Stony Brook University.

The focus of Rajaram’s research is on human learning and memory, with a major focus on the study of social aspects of memory from a cognitive perspective and how this process informs the emergence of collective memory. Original research on this topic by Rajaram’s group was a joint winner of the “Best Paper of the Year” Award, given by the Journal of Cognitive Psychology (Choi*^, Blumen^, Congleton^, & Rajaram, 2014; * lead author; ^student authors).  A recent article on this topic by her research group has been selected as Editor’s Choice in the prestigious journal the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Jin*, Choi*^, Greeley^, Pepe, Kensinger, Mohanty, & Rajaram, 2025; * lead authors; ^student authors). Research on collaborative remembering and collective memory by Rajaram’s group was also the topic of a play featured in the interdisciplinary Science on Stage event in 2023 at Stony Brook University.  

Research by Rajaram’s group addresses the transmission of memory in groups and social networks to understand how social influences shape memory and learning, how people develop shared memories, how accurate and erroneous information propagates among group members, and how collaborative learning and remembering influence memory in young and older adults and in educational contexts. This research addresses questions about how memory propagates among social connections and the consequences of such memory contagion, the indirect influence on our memories of people in our social networks whom we have never met, changes in our memory representations as a consequence of reminiscing with others, and the emergence of collective memory.  In another line of research, Rajaram’s group is investigating the nature of emotional memory, with an emphasis on the learning process, social influences, and autobiographical content that pertain to emotional information. Previously, Rajaram and her research group have also studied the differences between implicit and explicit memory, the distinction between episodic and semantic memory, and how attention modulates long-term memory. This work has examined memory processes across the spectrum of conscious awareness from vivid experiences to learning in the absence of awareness, testing people with intact memory and with organic amnesia.  

Rajaram’s research funding includes an early career, FIRST (First Independent Research Support & Transition, R29) Award from the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH), and since then grants from the NIMH, the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Russell Sage Foundation, Google, and Stony Brook University.  

Rajaram’s major invited lectures include the 2010 Plenary Address at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, the Psychonomic Society’s 2020 Award Winner Address, the 2019-2020 Distinguished Speaker Lecture at the NSF SBE Directorate, the 2022 APS–David Myers Lecture on the Science and Craft of Teaching Psychological Science, and a research presentation in the Plenary Panel on Collective Cognition at the 2025 APS Annual Convention.  Rajaram has been selected to deliver the  Conference Keynote at the 2025 Annual Conference of the Psychonomic Society.  

Rajaram’s leadership roles include serving as President (2017-2018) of the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the scientific organization spanning all areas of psychological science and the entire spectrum of scientific, applied, and teaching specialties with members worldwide. She has been an elected member of the APS Board of Directors (2012-2015) and a member of the APS Diversity Committee (2014-2018), and has chaired the APS Rising Stars Inaugural Committee (2015-2017). Previously, Rajaram served as Elected Chair (2008), Past Chair (2009) and Elected Member (2004-2009) of the Governing Board of the Psychonomic Society, the premier scientific organization for research in cognition. Rajaram also served as the Chair (2006-2007) of the Publications Committee of the Psychonomic Society that oversees the publication of its scientific journals.  

Rajaram is one of three co-founders, along with Drs. Judy Kroll and Randi Martin, of Women in Cognitive Science (WiCS), an international group developed in 2001 to promote the advancement of women in the cognitive sciences. WiCS has been supported by the NSF Advance Grant (2003-2008) and additional NSF grants to support the activities of WiCS, where Rajaram has also served as the Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator.  Rajaram  served as a conference co-organizer for WiCS  (2001-2020) and on the WiCS Advisory Board (2003-2023) for nearly two decades.

In 2019, Rajaram, along with Dr. Angela Gutchess (Brandeis University), co-founded the Culture and Cognition Pre-conference affiliated with the Psychonomic Society, to bring together a community of scientists working the influence of culture in shaping cognition.  Together, Gutchess and Rajaram have been awarded an NSF Conference Grant (2023-2025) to support the activities of this initiative.  

Rajaram co-chaired the Psychonomic Society’s Carbon Neutrality Task Force (2020-2024) and has served as a member of the Psychonomic Society COVID 19 Work Group.  She has been an elected member of the AAAS Electorate Nominating Committee (2020-2023), and  the American Psychological Association’s Board of Scientific Affairs (2021-2023). 

Rajaram has held several editorial positions.  She served as Associate Editor of Psychological Science (2007-2008), Psychological Bulletin (2003-2005), and Memory & Cognition (1998-2001), and on the Editorial Boards of the Journal of Memory and Language (2001-2006), the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition (1998-2002; 2006-2011), Memory & Cognition (2014-2019), and the APA Dictionary of Psychology (2001-2005, published 2006). Rajaram was Guest Co-Editor of a special issue on the Social Aspects of Memory for the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition (2014), and has served on the advisory board of the APS journal Current Directions in Psychological Science (2020-2024).

Rajaram has taught graduate courses in Memory and Graduate Professional Development and undergraduate courses in Memory, Human Brain Function, Research Methods in Psychology, Research Methods Laboratory, Research Methods in Cognition, and the Undergraduate Honors Seminar.