Emorie Beck, Ariel Mosley and Tomiko Yoneda were named among this year’s Rising Stars by the Association for Psychological Science, or APS, for their publications, discoveries and the potentially broad impact of their work.
“We consistently attract top talent to our faculty in psychology at UC Davis,” said Kristin H. Lagattuta, professor and chair of the Department of Psychology in the College of Letters and Science. “We are proud of the remarkable contributions our junior faculty are already making to psychological science, and we are confident that their outsized impact will continue to grow."
APS is the leading international organization dedicated to advancing scientific psychology. The Rising Star designation recognizes early career APS members for innovative research that has already advanced the field and signals high future potential.
Learn more about this year’s APS Rising Stars:
Emorie Beck, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Emorie Beck studies personality, from the single case to groups of people and from moments to lifetimes. Her work examines how personality is defined and measured, what it predicts in the short- and long-term and how it changes over time. In one line of research, she develops personalized machine-learning approaches to predict future behaviors and experiences, showing how individuals chart unique paths to the same outcomes. In another she examines how these unique paths are linked to long-term outcomes, including health, well-being and dementia.
Ariel J. Mosley, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Ariel J. Mosley studies how people navigate their social identities and their worlds, as well as how they relate to people in groups outside of their own. Combining theoretical perspectives of social cognition, intergroup relations and racial inequality, she explores how group-based biases and social power influence how group members respond to acts of cultural appropriation, how intersectional stereotypes affect the categorizations and experiences of marginalized group members and the strengths and resiliencies of marginalized group members who experience discrimination.
Tomiko Yoneda, Assistant Professor of Psychology
Tomiko Yoneda studies links between personality and cognitive aging, as well as the mechanisms underlying these relationships. She seeks to uncover factors that contribute to healthy cognitive aging. She also explores how psychological factors, such as loneliness, influence physiological and cognitive processes. In recent research, she found that when older couples experience positive emotions together in everyday life, they have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, which can cause health problems over time when elevated.
About the UC Davis Department of Psychology
The UC Davis Department of Psychology is home to more than 40 faculty with leadership across multiple subjects and specialties, including developmental psychology; quantitative psychology; social and personality psychology; biological psychology; and perception, cognition and cognitive neuroscience. In 2025, US News & World Report Grad School ranked the psychology graduate program #6 among public institutions and #14 overall, placing it in the top 2% of psychology Ph.D. programs in the U.S.
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