Rate My Professor Heather Niemeler

Heather M. Niemeier, Ph.D., serves as an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, a position she has held since joining the faculty in 2008. In addition, she has been a CATLST Fellow since 2023, contributing to the Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning Through Scholarship. Her academic journey includes a B.A. in Psychology and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from the University of Colorado at Boulder, and both predoctoral internship and postdoctoral training in Behavioral Medicine at Brown Medical School. Niemeier teaches a wide range of courses in the department's curriculum, including Individual & Society, Psychopathology, Introduction to Clinical, Counseling, and School Psychology, Advanced Health Psychology, and Field Training in Psychology. She is also the faculty advisor for the Active Minds chapter at UW-Whitewater, which received the Chapter of the Year award in 2022 for its mental health advocacy efforts.

Niemeier's research specializations center on the prevention and treatment of obesity and eating disorders, with her most recent work exploring acceptance-based treatment approaches for behavioral weight loss and investigating disordered eating attitudes and behaviors among college students. Her scholarly contributions include peer-reviewed publications such as "An acceptance-based behavioral intervention for weight loss" (2012), "Characteristics of adults with overweight/obesity and high internal disinhibition" (2017), and "Do food provisions packaged in single-servings reduce energy intake at breakfast?" (2009). Additionally, she has led initiatives to enhance inclusive teaching practices, such as the project "You are the Individual and We are All the Society: Personalizing Core 130," which updated syllabus language to be more inclusive and welcoming, incorporated activities to build classroom community like diversity bingo and social identities exercises, expanded content on racial and ethnic inequalities to include impacts of Covid-19 on diverse communities, hate crimes against various groups, and discrimination, and emphasized intersectional analyses of social identities including age, class, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, ability status, and more.