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Laurie Weingart

Laurie Weingart

Interim provost | Carnegie Mellon U | Class of 1984

Three decades and two university stops later, Laurie Weingart (BS ’84, industrial psychology) can still smell Campustown.

“The clove cigarettes and fresh ground coffee at The Daily Grind, the stale beer at Kam’s and Dooley's, and the tuna grinders and french fries at Trito’s,” she says, rattling off a few of her favorite things from her time at the UI, in the early ’80s.

But, says the interim provost at Carnegie Mellon University, “the one place on campus that had the biggest impact on life — after the apartment building on First and Daniels where I met my future husband, Greg — was the psychology building, where I discovered organizational psychology as a field of study and learned how to do research from two great female role models — a post doc, Ruth Kanfer, and a graduate student, Maureen Ambrose — both of whom are now accomplished scholars in their own right.

“There were many hours of coursework, running others’ studies in the behavioral lab with the one-way mirrors, programming PLATO for my own research, and learning how to systematically study psychological phenomena."