Academic Credentials
  • M.A., Psychology, State University of New York, Albany, 2024
  • B.S., Psychology & Music, Union College, 2020
Academic Appointments
  • Adjunct Instructor, Department of Psychology, Union College, 2025
  • Instructor, Department of Psychology, University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), 2023-2025
Professional Honors
  • National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship (NDSEG), The United States Department of Defense (DoD), 2023-2026
  • Graduate Travel Award, The Psychonomic Society, 2025
  • SUNY Graduate Research Empowering and Accelerating Talent (GREAT) Award, SUNY Office of Research and Economic Development, 2024
  • Diversity Travel Award, The Auditory Perception & Cognition Society, 2022
Professional Affiliations
  • Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
  • The Auditory Perception and Cognition Society (APCS) — Social Media Officer
  • The American Psychological Association (APA)
  • The New England Psychological Association
  • The Psychonomic Society
  • The Society for Mathematical Psychology
  • The Society for Personality and Social Psychology

Mr. Nate Gillespie is a cognitive scientist in Exponent's Human Factors practice who applies his expertise in memory, visual and auditory perception, attention, decision-making, and computational modeling to evaluate human behavior in accidents, transportation safety, consumer product use, warnings and instructions, and complex information processing.

Mr. Gillespie has specific expertise in how people perceive, encode, represent, and retrieve complex information, particularly in the auditory domain. He has 10 years of experience designing human-subjects research, developing natural language processing and computational modeling methods, and investigating the measurement of human memory and performance. He has presented his research at more than 30 scientific conferences and has published peer-reviewed articles in leading memory and auditory cognition journals. Mr. Gillespie processes and statistically analyzes large qualitative and quantitative data sets using methods including regression modeling, principal components analysis, structural equation modeling, probabilistic topic modeling, and cognitive modeling. 

Mr. Gillespie recently defended his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at the University at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), with an anticipated conferral date in December 2026. His doctoral research focused on improving the measurement of memory for complex auditory information. Important problems addressed by his work include clarifying the role of sound texture in auditory recognition; characterizing individual differences in auditory perception; and understanding connections between the visual and auditory memory systems. During his Ph.D., Mr. Gillespie served as a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellow (NDSEG) with the United States Department of Defense (DoD) and taught and mentored graduate and undergraduate students in statistical methods, research design, and cognition.