Melissa Ferguson is an experimental social psychologist.  She received her doctorate in social psychology from New York University in 2002, and then joined the psychology department at Cornell University.  Her research interests all relate to the conscious versus unconscious processes that enable social decisions, attitudes, and behavior.  In particular, she has studied the automaticity of attitudes, goal pursuit, and ideology, and the interconnections among them.  Lately, she has also become interested in implicit identity, embodiment, self-control, and the ways in which neuroscience can inform social cognition theory.