Nalini Ambady

American social psychologist

Nalini Ambady (March 20, 1959 – October 28, 2013) was an Indian-American social psychologist and a leading expert on nonverbal behavior and interpersonal perception.She was born in Calcutta, India and earned her bachelor’s degree at Lady Shri Ram College for women, Delhi University.

She furthered her education by moving to the United States for her master’s degree in psychology, from the College of William and Mary, and later received her PhD in social psychology from Harvard.

While completing her research at Harvard, she met her husband Raj Marphatia, who was studying at Harvard Law school.After completing her PhD in 1991, she quickly entered the ranks of academia by accepting a position as an assistant professor at the college of the Holy Cross; she become an associate professor at Tufts University.

Ambady later joined the Stanford faculty in 2011, becoming the first individual of Indian origin to teach in Stanford’s department of Psychology.

Most notably in her academic career she introduced and conducted extensive research around the concept of thin slice judgments.While teaching at Stanford she founded the SPARQ center and worked to build it until her death in 2013 from leukemia.

Her death sparked campaigns to increase the number of South-Asian bone marrow registries globally.