Professor, Department of Psychology
Director, Social & Affective Neuroscience Lab
Director, Berkman Consultants
Co-Director, Center for Translational Neuroscience
Curriculum Vitae

Ph.D., UCLA, 2010
M.A., UCLA, 2005
M.A., Stanford, 2004
B.A., Psychology, Stanford, 2002
B.S., Mathematics, Stanford, 2002

Elliot Berkman is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon. His research is about the motivational and cognitive factors that contribute to success and failure real-world goals, as well as the neural systems that support goal pursuit. In addition to studying how goal pursuit works, Dr. Berkman’s research also seeks ways to facilitate health behavior change goals such as cigarette smoking cessation and dieting. His research combines the distinct strengths of several research methods including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), cross-sectional and longitudinal survey methods, laboratory experiments, and translational neuroscience randomized controlled trials. Click here for more information about his research. He teaches courses in statistics, neuroimaging, and social psychology. His research, mentorship, and teaching have been recognized with the APS Janet Taylor Spence Transformative Early Career Award, the Excellence in Graduate Mentorship Award from the University of Oregon, the Social-Personality Health Network Early Career Award, the Joseph A. Gengerelli Distinguished Dissertation Award, the UCLA Social Psychology Dissertation Award, the Arthur J. Woodward Peer Mentoring Award and the UCLA Distinguished Teaching Award. He received his PhD in 2010 from the University of California, Los Angeles. His blog, The Motivated Brain, is located at Psychology Today, and he microblogs on Mastodon and on Twitter as @Psychologician.