Academic Credentials
  • Ph.D., Experimental Psychology, University of Idaho, 2021
  • M.S., Experimental Psychology, University of Idaho, 2016
  • B.S., Psychology, Southern Oregon University, 2013
Academic Appointments
  • Lecturer, Psychology, Washington State University, 2020-2021
Professional Affiliations
  • American Society of Safety Professionals, 2021-present
  • Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, 2021-present

Dr. Davis is an experimental psychologist with expertise in attention, decision making, and visual and auditory perception. Their work focuses on understanding factors that can impact decision making in safety-critical contexts, including distraction and perceptual impairment. 

Dr. Davis has over eight years of experience conducting rigorous empirical human subjects research using diverse methodologies to address complex research questions about human behavior, cognition, and perception. In addition to designing and carrying out empirical studies, their skillset also includes analysis and presentation of results to diverse audiences both academic and professional. Since joining Exponent, they have applied their expertise to projects involving driver distraction, vehicle automation, product safety, and warning compliance.

Prior to joining Exponent, Dr. Davis earned their Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, with an emphasis in Human Factors, from the University of Idaho. Their research work was focused on injury prevention and how people make decisions in safety-critical contexts such as pedestrian crossings. They spearheaded development of a state-of-the-art virtual reality pedestrian crossing simulator for conducting controlled laboratory studies of human behavior in road crossing scenarios, an apparatus they used for their dissertation research which focused on how conditions of visual impairment affect pedestrian decision making. In addition to their primary doctoral research, they also worked on projects examining human performance in domains including low-altitude flight and power plant process control.