Researcher, Music Aficionado, and Life-Long Learner...
Highlights: --Research training received from: cognitive psychology, educational psychology, statistics, and neuroscience.
--Research interests: spatial ability, STEM education, and music cognition.
--Hobbies: violin, Chinese calligraphy, drawing, and learning languages.
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Lu Wang, Ph. D. is an assistant professor in educational psychology at Ball State University. She received her B.A. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, master’s degree from Harvard Graduate School of Education, and doctorate from the University of Georgia. Her prior training spans from neuroscience, cognitive psychology, educational psychology, to applied statistics. In addition, she has a minor in music from the University of Pennsylvania and still pursues violin playing as a serious hobby to these days. Her academic research interests can be roughly grouped into the following threads:
Cognitive and affective variables that contribute to individual and gender differences in STEM achievement.
Basic cognitive processes underlying numerical cognition and spatial reasoning.
Cognitive, motor, and affective variables that contribute to different aspects of music cognition.
These research interests resulted in multiple publications in prestigious journals such as Educational Psychologist, Frontiers in Psychology, and Child Development, to name a few, in the past few years. Furthermore, Wang has also been invited by renowned international book publishers to contribute book chapters on topics of her expertise or professional interests. In addition to conducting original research, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and communicating with a broader audience in a book format, Wang also consistently produced high quality reviews for multiple academic journals, either as an ad hoc reviewer or in the role of an editorial board member in the past few years.
Aside from academic writing, Wang is also a passionate writer on non-academic subjects. She had won many writing competitions in her native language, Mandarin Chinese, prior to college. Her first book, a collection of travel memoirs based on her travel experiences in Japan, Hong Kong, and Italy, was published in Mandarin Chinese at the age of eighteen. In college, Wang took intermediate and advanced language courses in Italian as electives and was the first individual of Asian ethnicity in the university’s history who won Premio Vittorini (“The Vittorini Prize”), a monetary prize awarded for the best essay written during the academic year for a course on Italian Literature, Italian Culture or Society, Italian History, and Italian Cinema in Italian.