Rachel Godsil

Perception Institute
Co-Founder and Senior Research Advisor, Perception Institute

ARachel Godsil is a Distinguished Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Scholar at Rutgers Law School and Co-Founder of Perception Strategies and Perception Institute. She collaborates with social scientists on empirical research to identify the efficacy of interventions to promote belonging and to address implicit bias, identity anxiety, and stereotype threat. She regularly works with institutions and within systems seeking to promote fairness and belonging and to overcome obstacles associated with social identity (e.g. race, ethnicity, religion, gender, ability). Rachel has also co/authored numerous articles and book chapters such as: Overcoming Identity-Based Hierarchies: Understanding Psychological Barriers and Motivating Social Justice Through Intergroup Contact (forthcoming, 2023 in Law and Psychology); Promoting Fairness? Examining the Efficacy of Implicit Bias Training in the Criminal Justice System (Bias in the Law, 2020), The Moral Ecology of Policing: A Mind Science Approach to Race and Policing in the United States in The Routledge Handbook of Criminal Justice Ethics (The Routledge Handbook of Criminal Justice Ethics, 2016). She is a lead author of Perception Institute reports, including The Science of Equality in Education: The Impact of Implicit Bias, Racial Anxiety, and Stereotype Threat on Student Outcomes (2018), The “Good Hair” Study: Explicit and Implicit Attitudes Toward Black Women’s Hair (2017), and The Science of Equality, Volume 2: The Effects of Gender Roles, Implicit Bias, and Stereotype Threat on the Lives of Women and Girls (2016). With Perception, she has collaborated with other organizations to produce influential reports, such as Challenging the Disparities Default: Reframing and Reclaiming Women's Power (2020); a research review with Story At Scale entitled What Are We Up Against? An Intersectional Examination of Stereotypes Associated with Gender? (2020), a toolkit with the Executives’ Alliance, His Story: Shifting Narratives of Boys and Men of Color (2018), and a volume of the PopJustice initiative, Pop Culture, Perceptions, and Social Change: A Research Review (2016). Rachel is a member of the Solidarity Council for Racial Equity with the W.K.Kellogg Foundation. She was on on the advisory board for Research, Integration, Strategies, and Evaluation (RISE) for Boys and Men of Color at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education, and is currently on the boards of the Systemic Justice Project at Harvard Law School, and the Poverty and Race Research Action Council. Previously, Rachel was Eleanor Bontecou Professor of Law at Seton Hall University Law School, a Visiting Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and taught property at New York University Law School. Rachel holds a J.D. from Michigan Law School (magna cum laude and Order of the Coif). After law school, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, an Associate Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, focusing on environmental justice, as well as an associate with Berle, Kass & Case and Arnold & Porter in New York City. 8 In addition, you will be working closely with Rebecca Willett and the PM & Operations team in supporting day-to-day operational processes.