Alex Borgella, Ph.D.

Hi, I’m Alex Borgella (bor-HEY-ya). I'm an associate professor and research scientist in the Department of Psychology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.

One of the most important aspects about my life as it relates to my career is that I was born and raised in a multicultural family - I'm half Cuban on my father's side and Korean on my mother's. Having a racially, ethnically, and culturally diverse background but being able to "pass" as White prompted my interests in both psychological science and race-related issues (e.g., racial discrimination and the barriers to intergroup communication) from a very young age, and I pursued those interests in my undergraduate college career at the University of West Florida. After receiving my B.A. in Psychology there, I went on to earn my M.A. and Ph.D. from James Madison University and Tufts University respectively, both concentrating in experimental social psychology.

After receiving my Ph.D., I spent two years as a visiting assistant professor of psychology at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. I am now an associate professor of psychology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.

I have a wide variety of hobbies outside the office: mountain biking, writing music, logo design, coding websites (like this one!), building DIY home gym equipment, playing all sorts of video games, and exploring huge mountains with Paige, Maeby the Border Collie, and all our friends.

My research program is dedicated to understanding the mental processes behind how biases form, the ways they persist, and how we talk about them.

More specifically, my main research interests are in three interdependent areas:

• How members of different social groups communicate in intergroup contexts.
• How unconscious or implicit forms of bias can affect decision-making.
• How bias manifests and affects people differently within individual social categories.

For much more detail on current research projects, previous studies, student projects, and future directions, please check out my lab, The Social Psychological Experimentation (SPEx) Lab at Fort Lewis College.

I've been passionate about teaching since my first teaching assistantship in graduate school, especially courses that involve research methods and social psychological principles directly. My goals as a teacher are to use lessons from these two areas along with students' own creativity and life experiences to build strong theoretical foundations in psychological science. After around a decade of teaching undergraduate psychology majors, I've come to believe these foundations are created by emphasizing three key components:

• A survey of the history of psychological research - the good, bad, and ugly parts included,
• An understanding of the scientific method and the reasons we rely on it over other forms of knowing, and
• A slightly-above-basic knowledge of how to use statistics to answer scientific questions.

These components reinforce each other and allow students the freedom to shape their own learning. Thus, my favorite courses to teach are those that directly involve Experimental Psychology and FLC's Senior Research Capstone course, both of which involve supervising student-led research and afford me the space to design lessons about these tougher areas around psychological topics about which students are excited.

For more information on my classes, current offerings, and my institution, please visit my faculty homepage and FLC Psychology's website.

For questions and media inquiries, please contact me using my Fort Lewis College email address (amborgella@fortlewis.edu)