Dr. Priti Shah (she/her) is a Professor at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. She specializes in research on STEM learning, online learning, neuromyths, and attention. She received her PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in 1996. 

Dr. Shah is director of the Basic and Applied Cognition Laboratory. Her research focuses on higher level cognition (thinking, reasoning, problem solving), the basic cognitive mechanisms supporting these abilities (executive functions, attention), and educational application. She has edited 3 volumes and published over 70 articles and book chapters. Her work has been funded by the Institute for Educational Sciences, the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, the Spencer Foundation, and the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

Dr. Shah cares deeply about the intersection of high quality educational science and collaborates with cognitive science experts, teachers, and others to share their knowledge and insights. She founded the STAR (Students Tackling Advanced Research) Scholars program at University of Michigan – an organization devoted to teaching underrepresented undergraduate students in the psychology department the skills they need to acquire research positions and apply to graduate school. 

Recommended research publication: Nancekivell, S. E., Sun, X., Gelman, S. A., & Shah, P. (2021). A slippery myth: How learning style beliefs shape reasoning about multimodal instruction and related scientific evidence. Cognitive Science, 45(10), e13047.