About Us

From the Chair

Welcome to the USF Department of Psychology!

Stephen Stark

Stephen Stark, Ph.D.
Professor and Chair,
Department of Psychology

The USF Psychology Department is home to more than 2,500 undergraduate and 100 graduate students. Our community also includes 12 administrative staff and academic advisors and over 50 core, affiliated, and emeritus faculty members. We are one of the largest departments at USF.

The field of psychology is a major backbone of science, encompassing extraordinarily diverse topics such as mental health, child psychology, cognition, memory, learning, neuroscience, leadership, multiculturalism and diversity, social and personality psychology, organizational psychology, personnel selection, individual and team performance, occupational health and safety, research design, psychological measurement and analytics, animal science, decision making, human-technology systems, and more. Our undergraduate program offers you a well-rounded education by providing a wide variety of psychology courses, while allowing you some electives to pursue in depth a particular aspect of the field. Since our department was founded in 1961, we have offered a B.A. degree to over 18,147 undergraduate students.

For those of you who are interested in pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology, our three program concentrations are: Clinical (CL), Industrial-Organizational (I-O), and Cognition, Neuroscience, and Social Psychology (CNS). In all three concentrations, we see as its mission the training of graduate students as independent scholars who will dedicate themselves to the pursuit of knowledge. As such, research is a fundamentally important aspect of doctoral study. Since our doctoral program was established in 1971, we have successfully produced over 650 excellent scholars and skilled clinicians. We also offer a separate and self-contained M.A. degree in Psychological Sciences, which includes the study of biological, social, developmental, and cognitive bases of health and human behavior.  

Please explore our websites. You will see how we are providing our students with an understanding of the importance of the scientific approach in tackling many issues of human behavior. These issues can be important, serious, and difficult challenges we are facing. But you will certainly learn that they can also be fascinating, exciting, and rewarding challenges.