Lydia Emery joined the faculty as an Assistant Professor in 2023. She received her B.A. in Psychology and English from Haverford College and her Ph.D. in Psychology from Northwestern University. She completed postdoctoral training in the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University before coming to the University of Chicago.

Her program of research focuses on close relationships, considering in particular how both social class contexts and people’s individual self-concepts affect their romantic relationships. In her first line of work, she examines how social class shapes both the strengths people bring to their relationships and the challenges that they encounter. She is also interested in how relationships can serve as sources of strength in lower-SES contexts. In her second line of work, she considers how people’s self-concepts affect their relationships and how relationships, in turn, can change the self. Furthermore, she investigates how couples build and understand a new identity together. In a third line of work, she adopts a metascientific perspective on how psychology researchers can make their samples more diverse and representative, and how they can engage in more inclusive reporting practices.