Jessecae Marsh, Ph.D.

Associate Dean for Interdisciplinary Programs and International Initiatives, Associate Professor of Psychology

Dr. Marsh joined Lehigh in 2011 and is an associate professor in the Psychology Department. She was the director of the Health, Medicine, and Society program from July, 2017 to July 2022. She completed her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at Yale University in 2008 and spent three years as an assistant professor at Texas Tech University before joining Lehigh’s faculty. Dr. Marsh’s research addresses how the beliefs that people hold influence the way they think about the world. She has investigated how people form hypotheses about the causal relationships between events and how these hypotheses can in turn influence how people learn about new causal relationships. She has explored how the causal beliefs people hold influence how they think about categories that exist in the world. Dr. Marsh has applied her research interests to the health domain. For example, she has explored how health professionals’ beliefs about mental disorder categories differ from laypeople’s beliefs about those same categories and how people’s beliefs about the causal etiology of disease influences how they make decisions about that disease. Dr. Marsh has taught an HMS undergraduate seminar cross-listed with the Psychology Department entitled “Health Care Reasoning and Decision-Making."