Erika Kirgios
Assistant Professor
Chicago Booth
Erika Kirgios studies workplace diversity and inequality, with secondary interests in prosocial behavior and behavior change. In her primary stream of work, she explores psychological factors that perpetuate inequality and identifies theoretically grounded interventions that can improve outcomes for members of historically marginalized groups. For example, she has investigated how, when, and why increasing the salience of diversity and identity—as opposed to hiding or obscuring identity—can benefit women and racial minorities. She specializes in designing and running field experiments, which can offer a unique window into how psychological effects play out in organizational contexts. She has partnered with gyms, hospitals, non-profits, technology firms, governments, and start-ups.
Her work has been published in such journals as Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, Management Science, and Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes.
Kirgios earned a PhD from the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her doctoral studies at Wharton, she graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University with a BA in computer science, and minors in cognitive science and neuroscience.