Jennifer McLeer

Education

PhD, University of South Carolina

MA, University of South Carolina

BA, Manhattan College

Jennifer McLeer is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hartford with over 15 years of experience conducting social scientific research. Her areas of expertise include topics within group processes (such as status, leadership, choice, decision-making, cooperation) and the relationship between individual interactions and group level outcomes.

Jennifer designs and teaches a number of in-person and online graduate level courses that focus on:

1. how bias, heuristics, and other sociological and social psychological mechanisms affect choice and decision-making (called PSY 545: Social Psychology of Organizations/Online);
2. the role of stakeholders (executive leadership, HR, employees, boards, external partners) and internal/external environments (organizational culture, macroeconomics, organized labor, and the environment) in micro-level organizational strategy and planning (called PSY 545: Strategic Organizations/Online);
3. the research proposal process for an experiment from idea conceptualization through project pitch (called PSY 510: Experimental Design/On-ground); and
4. using and applying statistics in organizational settings (called PSY 581: Advanced Research Methods/On-ground).

Jennifer enjoys collaborating in team sciences environments with multidisciplinary researchers in academic and applied settings. Jennifer is a faculty affiliate of the van Rooy Institute for Complexity and Conflict Analysis at the University of Hartford where she collaborates with interdisciplinary faculty to increase the prominence of the study of complexity, ill-structured problems, and emergent phenomenon. Jennifer also works on government-contracted projects where she applies her expertise in group processes to military units. Through this work, Jennifer has experience authoring scientific reports, technical reports, research product reports, white papers, cooperative agreement proposals, handbooks, curricula, conference presentations, and journal submissions.

Jennifer completed her doctoral work in sociology, focusing on sociological social psychology, in 2015 from the University of South Carolina. She also holds degrees in religious studies and organizational psychology from Manhattan College.

When not professer-izing, Jennifer enjoys reading even more books, slowly doing Ravensburger puzzles, watching early morning F1 races, and, of course, experiencing all of the outdoor wonders of the great and quaint state of Connecticut (and Rhode Island)!