About the author

Claude M. Steele is the new Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost at UC Berkeley as of March 31, 2014. In addition to serving as executive vice chancellor and provost, Steele will have an appointment as Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Graduate School of Education.

Claude M. Steele served as the I. James Quillen Dean for the School of Education at Stanford University from 2011 - 2014. From 2009 - 2011, Steele served as the 21st Provost of Columbia University. Before joining Columbia University, he was a faculty member at Stanford University from 1991 - 2009, holding appointments as the Lucie Stern Professor in the Social Sciences, as director of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, and as director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He is recognized as a leader in the field of social psychology and for his commitment to the systematic application of social science to problems of major societal significance.

He was educated at Hiram College and at Ohio State University, where he received his PhD in psychology in 1971. Over the next 20 years, he taught at the University of Utah, the University of Washington and the University of Michigan. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, Yale University, Princeton University, and from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

EVCP Steele's research focuses on the psychological experience of the individual and, particularly, on the experience of threats to the self and the consequences of those threats. His early work considered the self-image threat, self-affirmation and its role in self-regulation, the academic under-achievement of minority students, and the role of alcohol and drug use in self-regulation processes and social behavior. While at Stanford University, he further developed the theory of stereotype threat, designating a common process through which people from different groups, being threatened by different stereotypes, can have quite different experiences in the same situation. The theory has also been used to understand group differences in performance ranging from the intellectual to the athletic.

Dr. Steele has published articles in numerous scholarly journals. His recent book, Whistling Vivaldi: And Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us and What We Can Do, was published in 2010.
Also see http://newscenter.berkeley.edu/2014/01/13/steele-named-evcp/