Megan LaMotte is a social psychologist who joined the Penn State Behrend faculty and was appointed as the Associate Director of Research and Evaluation at the Susan Hirt Hagen Center for Community Outreach, Research, and Evaluation (CORE) in 2024. Her topical expertise includes the social patterning of mental health by way of the stress process — in other words, how our social statuses (e.g., our race, gender, and class) influence our exposure to stressors, how we cope, and the consequences to our well-being.

Dr. LaMotte grew up 4 hours southeast of Behrend in Danville, PA and earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology and women/gender studies from the University of Delaware in 2015. For three years between undergraduate and graduate school, Dr. Lamotte worked at Geisinger Health System’s Obesity Institute, a clinic-based research center aimed at reducing obesity and its comorbidities. This was an invaluable experience: getting to be a part of a robust applied research team involved in everything from pharmaceutical trials to biobanking and behavioral interventions. She then began graduate school at the University of Nevada, Reno to pursue her interests in social psychology. There, she strengthened her methodological toolkit, studying advanced statistics and research methods.