Susan Carol Losh, Ph.D.: Social Psychologist and Research Methodologist

Susan Carol Losh, Ph.D., is a Social Psychologist and Research Methodologist in the Department of Educational Psychology and Learning Systems at Florida State University. Her specialties are social cognition, including social perception, attitudes, and public opinion, and group dynamics. Much of her earlier research addressed attitudes toward women and African Americans. She also examines how cognitive processes and group dynamics apply to tolerance of diversity and intergroup prejudice and tolerance, including gender, ethnicity, and religion.

Dr. Losh has studied how gender and education influence access to computers, use of computers, and attitudes toward computers over time. "The 'digital divide' is for real," she said, "and I have been startled and dismayed that aspects of it are increasing, rather than decreasing." She has also analyzed how gender and education influence basic science knowledge and support for pseudo-science systems. A synopsis of this research on science knowledge was also published in the January 2002 issue of Popular Science.

Dr. Losh wrote a paper with Brandon Nzekwe about the U.S. public and a sample of education majors, published in Science & Education, and a second article in the 2011 Journal of Science, Education and Technology. She studied science reasoning, or understanding the processes of science inquiry, among the American adult public. Her findings were presented at the Public Communication of Science and Technology-9 in Seoul, South Korea, in May 2006. She also presented an update to these findings in London for an International Workshop on Science Indicators, now published in a book with Routledge Paul, as well as in Florida State University's Research in Review synopsis. Her research on stereotypes was featured on Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science, jointly sponsored by the American Institute on Physics and Ivanhoe Broadcast News.

Dr. Losh organized two symposiums for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a third symposium for the American Association for Public Opinion Research in Spring 2001 in Montreal, a fourth with the American Educational Research Association in Spring 2004 in San Diego, and a fifth for the American Association for the Advancement of Science in early 2007.