Educator Award from the University of Kansas in 2018, and was named the 2018 Mentor of the Year for her involvement with the McNair Scholars Program. Research Biernat is perhaps best known for her work on social stereotypes. She received the Philip Brickman Memorial Prize (1987) for an earlier version of the paper Stereotypes on campus: How contact and liking influence perceptions of group distinctiveness. This paper explored the contact hypothesis – that interactions with members of a stereotyped group may lead to increase liking of the group, subsequently decreasing the strength of the stereotype. Biernat is well known for her research on social stereotypes, and the widely cited model of shifting standards, which proposed that people tend to use category-specific standards to judge members of stereotyped groups. One of her recent studies examined social judgments and prejudice involving race. A student sent an email expressing interest in graduate training to more than 400 White professors: in some emails, the student used a Chinese name, Xian, and in others he used an Americanized name, Alex. More of the professors responded to student's request when email used the name Alex instead of Xian. Such findings suggest that faculty members may use cultural factors in judging graduate school applicants. Biernat's co-authored paper “Coming out” among gay Latino and gay White men: implications of verbal disclosure for well-being," published in the journal Self and Identity, was named “best paper of the year” in 2016 by the International Society for Self and Identity (ISSI). This paper examined different rates of disclosure about sexual orientation among gay Latino and White men in relation to subjective well-being. Representative publications References External links Faculty Page Research Lab Living people 1963 births American women psychologists 21st-century American psychologists Social psychologists University of Kansas faculty University of Michigan alumni American women academics 21st-century American women 20th-century American psychologists