Ramaswami Mahalingam

Ram Mahalingam received his PhD in Developmental Psychology from the University of Pittsburgh. He was originally trained as a civil engineer and held more than 12 different jobs (math tutor, film script writer, children’s theater activist, poet, writer, lecturer, night watchman, dish washer, cook, book stacker and preschool teacher) including being a Structural engineer for 8 years before settling as a psychologist. He is currently an Professor at the University of Michigan in the Personality and Social Contexts program. He is also a core faculty member of the Psychology and Women’s Studies Joint PhD program. He was the interim director for the Culture and Cognition program at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on Culture, gender and psychological well-being.

He has four major lines of research. In one line of research he investigated how extreme gender discrimination, such as sex selective abortion, affects community mental health in various parts of India. He also studied children and adults’ beliefs about caste. In another line of research, he has been studying how model minority stereotypes affect the psychological well-being of Asian American men and women in the United States. In his third line of research, he is studying the professional identity development of women engineering students and women engineering faculty members in India. In his fourth line of research, he examines whether nurturing mindful awareness enhance the resilience of members of marginalized community members. He edited two books: Multicultural Curriculum (Routledge) with Cameron McCarthy; Cultural Psychology of Immigrants (Lawrence Erlbaum). He teaches courses on Gender psychology, Cultural psychology of immigrants, Psychology of Mindfulness and Psychology of films.