The UC Davis Department of Psychology graduate program was ranked #6 among public institutions and #14 overall in the 2025 US News & World Report Grad School rankings.
This ranking places the department in the top 2% of U.S. psychology Ph.D. programs and second only to veterinary medicine among UC Davis graduate programs.
“This recognition not only highlights the department’s leadership in the field of psychology, but also underscores the important contributions they are making to the university’s national reputation,” said Estella Atekwana, dean of the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis.
Research leadership across multiple areas in psychology
The UC Davis Department of Psychology is home to more than 40 faculty with leadership across multiple subjects and specialties that include developmental psychology; quantitative psychology; social and personality psychology; biological psychology; and perception, cognition and cognitive neuroscience.
Psychology faculty conduct research to answer key questions about people’s thinking, emotions and perceptions of the world. They study wide-ranging topics, such as what draws our attention, why we forget, how we process language, how we reason about the social world, what attracts us to other people and why we feel the way we do in personal relationships.
Other research focuses on how the brain supports cognition and emotion, why we procrastinate, how personality traits shape behavior and wellbeing, and how we develop during childhood, adolescence and adulthood. Their research methods involve cells, brains, families and communities, and covers translational research on Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, autism, ADHD, depression, anxiety, diabetes and malnutrition.
“Leadership and impact in so many areas of psychological science is a big reason for the rankings,” said Kristin H. Lagattuta, professor and chair of the department. “All of this builds a national and international reputation for UC Davis as being a place for exceptional research training in psychology.”
This leadership takes many forms, including consistently publishing in top journals and winning prestigious career, mentoring, and lifetime achievement awards. The faculty are elected fellows in elite national and international organizations, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. They also serve as editors in top scientific journals, give invited talks all over the world and secure millions of dollars of grant funding each year.
Ph.D. training to push the frontiers of research
This quality of faculty research attracts talented graduate students who go on to faculty and research positions at leading institutions. The Department of Psychology is home to more than 100 Ph.D. students. Graduate students take multiple courses, including an intensive series in quantitative methods and analyses, and they join faculty labs to develop further as research scientists.
“Ph.D. students who come to UC Davis receive high-quality training in research and mentoring that prepares them for a future as scientists inside and outside of academia,” said Lagattuta.
Many of these psychology labs are at the Center for Mind and Brain (CMB), a world-leading interdisciplinary research center studying the human mind and how the brain gives rise to it. Since its founding in 2002 by Distinguished Professor of Psychology Ron Mangun, CMB faculty have published more than 1,500 scientific papers and numerous books in the field. Psychology faculty also have labs at the California National Primate Center and the Center for Neuroscience.
High-quality undergraduate education
The quality contributing to the graduate school rankings also benefits undergraduate majors. Psychology has been the top UC Davis undergraduate major since the 2020-2021 academic year. For more than a decade before then, it was the second-largest major.
The department has also been highly ranked for their undergraduate program by US News & World Report in their most recent 2023 ratings by major. That year, the department was ranked #6 among U.S. public universities and #11 nationally overall.
Every faculty member, aside from being a leading researcher in their area, teaches undergraduate courses. The department is also home to Professors of Teaching who contribute to scholarship on teaching psychology while also helping to improve instruction across the department.
Psychology faculty have received some of UC Davis’ highest honors for teaching. Several psychology faculty have also been recognized with the Academic Senate Award for Undergraduate Teaching, including Distinguished Professor Lisa Oakes in 2025. This year, UC Davis also awarded its highest faculty honor, the 2025 UC Davis Prize for Teaching and Scholarly Achievement, to Distinguished Professor Steven Luck.
Lagattuta said that what attracts so many UC Davis students to studying psychology is that it responds to their intense curiosity about themselves and other people. It also prepares students for an array of careers beyond psychology, including medicine, law, education, politics and many others.
“Once students take intro psychology, they get hooked,” said Lagattuta. “Some enroll in our courses assuming that psychology is only about providing therapy, but they soon realize that psychological science investigates fundamental questions about mind, emotion and behavior. Many students also say that these are the classes that apply to real life and that will stick with you forever.”
A number of Letters and Science graduate programs are highly ranked by US News & World Report in 2025. Not all graduate program specialties are ranked each year. This year’s ranked Letters and Science graduate programs in addition to Psychology were English (#8 public, #21 overall), Economics (#8 public, #24 overall), History (#11 public, #25 overall), Political Science (#9 public, #25 overall) and Sociology (#17 public, #36 overall).
See more department and program rankings in the College of Letters and Science.
YOU MAY ALSO LIKE THESE STORIES
Understanding Fear to Rob it of its Strength
Psychology Ph.D. student Zachary Oakland, a military veteran, is developing a new understanding of social anxiety. What drives him, he said, is a need to understand post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a debilitating condition that many veterans bring home.
UC Davis Chemistry Graduate Student Selected to Conduct Research at DOE National Lab
Tatiana Mamani, a Ph.D. candidate in physical chemistry working with Professor of Chemistry Davide Donadio, is among 62 Ph.D. students selected nationwide to participate in Department of Energy's Office of Science Graduate Student Research program.