Rate My Professor Nao Hagiwara

Nao Hagiwara, Ph.D., serves as Professor of Public Health Sciences and Director of the Program on Health Disparities and Community Engagement Research at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, having joined the department in August 2023 from her prior role as Associate Professor of Psychology at Virginia Commonwealth University. Her academic background includes a Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Michigan State University (2010), an M.S. in Social Psychology from Michigan State University (2006), a B.A. in Psychology and Sociology (double majors, 2004), and a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Behavioral Oncology at the Karmanos Cancer Institute (2012). Hagiwara has earned prestigious awards such as the Outstanding Academic Title Award from CHOICE (2024), Fellow of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (2024), Research in Diversity Award from the Social Personality & Health Network (2023), Fellow of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (2023), and Excellence in Scholarship Award from Virginia Commonwealth University (2023). She is the Incoming President of the Social Personality & Health Network and has acted as Principal Investigator and Co-Investigator on numerous NIH-funded projects.

Her research focuses on developing theory-driven interventions to optimize patient-provider communication, drawing on social psychology theories of social cognition, social perceptions, and impression formation. She investigates healthcare providers’ attitudes and beliefs in patient-provider interactions and the management of chronic stress among individuals from diverse social groups, employing mixed methods research designs. Key publications include “The nature and validity of implicit bias training for healthcare providers and trainees: A systematic review” with colleagues (Science Advances, 2024), “A call for grounding implicit bias training in clinical and translational frameworks” (The Lancet, 2020), “Strides in racial bias training” (JAMA Network Open, 2024), and co-authorship of the book Unequal Health: Anti-Black Racism and the Threat to America’s Health (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Highly cited works feature “The effects of oncologist implicit racial bias in racially discordant oncology interactions” (Journal of Clinical Oncology, 2016; 437 citations) and “Racial attitudes, physician–patient talk time ratio, and adherence in racially discordant medical interactions” (Social Science & Medicine, 2013; 253 citations). Her contributions have appeared in flagship journals and media outlets such as CNN and The New York Times.