Dawn R. Weatherford

Dawn R. Weatherford is an Associate Professor of Psychology in the Department of Health and Behavioral Sciences at Texas A&M University–San Antonio. She directs the Memory, Attention, and Perception (MAP) Research Laboratory and co-directs the Social Comparison (SoCo) Research Laboratory, mentoring graduate and undergraduate researchers in cognitive and applied psychology.

Her research asks how expertise, attention, and memory shape the way we process complex information — with particular focus on faces. That question reaches from the laboratory into the courtroom (eyewitness identification), the security checkpoint (detecting fraudulent IDs), and the classroom (how students learn to become researchers).

She earned her PhD in Psychology, with a specialty in Cognition, from Texas A&M University–Commerce in 2013, and has secured more than $1.4 million in external and internal funding, including awards from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

Weatherford is a committed open-science researcher: she preregisters studies, shares materials and data, and builds free, reusable resources for the wider community. Two of those resources — the FACETS face database and the PREP research-training program — are openly available to researchers and students everywhere.

Above all, she is a teacher. More than eighty undergraduate researchers have trained in her lab since 2016, co-authoring peer-reviewed papers and going on to graduate and professional programs across the country. Her lab runs on a simple premise: you are a person first, and good science grows out of a community that treats its people that way.

Currently: research sabbatical (Fall 2025) in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Queensland, the Australian National University, UNSW Sydney, and Macquarie University.