Memory & Decision Expert Witness - Harvard Faculty

Specialties & Experience of this Expert Witness

Additional Information

Dr. Elizabeth A. Phelps is the Pershing Square Professor of Human Neuroscience at Harvard University and a leading authority on the cognitive neuroscience of memory, emotion, and decision-making. For more than three decades, her research has examined how emotion shapes what people remember and how they decide. She has conducted foundational work on the amygdala's role in fear and emotional memory, and landmark longitudinal studies of memory for the September 11, 2001 attacks that demonstrate how vivid emotional memories drift in accuracy over time even as confidence in them remains high. Dr. Phelps's research is directly relevant to legal matters involving eyewitness memory and identification, the reliability of memory for traumatic or highly emotional events, the effects of stress on encoding and retrieval, suggestibility and the influence of post-event information, the relationship between confidence and accuracy in eyewitness testimony, and decision-making under emotional or high-arousal conditions. She served on the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Eyewitness Identification (2013–2014), the Institute of Medicine Committee on the Assessment and Treatment of PTSD (2012–2014), and the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Law and Neuroscience (2007–2014). Dr. Phelps is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has served as president of the Association for Psychological Science, the Society for Neuroeconomics, and the Society for Affective and Social Neuroscience. Her work has been recognized with the William James Award, the George A. Miller Prize, the BBRF Goldman-Rakic Prize, and the APS Mentor Award. Dr. Phelps received her PhD from Princeton University and held faculty appointments at Yale University and New York University before joining Harvard in 2018. She has authored more than 200 peer-reviewed publications. Dr. Phelps is available for expert witness engagements involving memory reliability, eyewitness identification, traumatic and emotional memory, suggestibility, and decision-making under stress. She accepts both criminal and civil matters and is available for case consultation, expert report preparation, deposition, and trial testimony.