Early in her doctoral training, Dr. Mayer had the opportunity to work with pioneers in the then-named field of “behavioral community psychology”: E. Scott Geller and Richard Winett. Working with these professors convinced her that operant conditioning principles could be strategically used to promote health and safety behaviors on a large scale—across groups and communities. That set the stage for my career in academia. She has had a long-standing interest in eating behavior and food selection at the point-of-purchase, and also has conducted series of studies in breast cancer screening and skin cancer prevention. She has had an ongoing commitment to 1)objective measurement of behavior; 2) use of stringent experimental research designs in community settings; 3) creative interventions; 4) dissemination of evidence-based interventions into the “real world”; and 5) interventions that have environmental-level and policy-level impacts.
Current Research Project(s):