Sara Weston ☕️
Sara Weston

Associate Professor of Psychology

About Me

I am a behavioral science and research methodology expert with over a decade of experience leading high-impact research. I specialize in advanced statistical methods—including text analysis, longitudinal modeling, and Bayesian approaches—and in translating complex findings into actionable insights for policymakers, non-technical stakeholders, and cross-disciplinary teams. Driven by both scientific rigor and real-world impact, my research has informed federal policy, advanced methodological standards in psychology, and equipped the next generation of scholars with the tools to conduct transparent, high-quality research.

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Interests
  • Personality and individual differences
  • Human-centered research
  • Natural language processing
  • Text analysis
  • Behavior and outcomes
Education
  • PhD Psychology

    Washington University in St. Louis

  • MA Psychology

    Washington University in St. Louis

  • BA English & Psychology

    Northwestern University

My Research
I’m a behavioral scientist who studies how our personalities, emotions, and social worlds shape health and well-being over time. I use big datasets, advanced stats, and creative measurement tools to understand both what changes and what stays the same about people. My work ranges from building new ways to measure personality to turning thousands of open-ended survey responses into insights that help shape policy—like my COVID-19 research with the RAPID-EC project. At the heart of it all, I want my science to be transparent, reproducible, and useful for both researchers and the communities we serve.
Featured Publications
Selected Publications
(2024). Associations for sense of purpose with smoking and health outcomes among adults with diabetes. International Journal of Behavioral Medicine.
(2024). Person-environment fit among U.S. immigrants: Associations with well-being and health. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
(2024). The role of personality traits in health care utilization. Personality Science.
(2024). Using structural topic modeling to understand ethnicity-related narratives. Journal of personality.
(2023). Selecting the Number and Labels of Topics in Topic Modeling: A Tutorial. Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science.