Tess Neal

Tess Neal, Ph.D. is the director of the Law-Psychology Program at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. A scientist and licensed psychologist, Dr. Neal focuses her research on the intersection of science and the law, examining the quality of expert evidence and human decision-making in legal contexts. 

Dr. Neal serves as Editor-in-Chief for Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, a journal published by the American Psychological Association. Her research portfolio includes an edited book and more than 60 peer-reviewed publications in journals such as Law and Human Behavior, Nature Reviews Psychology, and Psychological Science in the Public Interest. Her work has been funded by multiple grants from the National Science Foundation and other sources. 

Dr. Neal was selected as a Fulbright Scholar at UNSW Sydney in 2022 to compare the functioning of legal standards for the admission of expert evidence across two common-law countries. She is a Fellow of both the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association (APA). In 2025, she received the Mid-Career Award from the American Psychology-Law Society (APA Division 41), following previous early career awards from the American Academy of Forensic Psychology and the Society for Personality Assessment. 

In addition to her academic research, Dr. Neal maintains a small private practice established in 2021. She consults on issues related to biases in expert judgment and on challenges to the quality of expert evidence, particularly psychological expert testimony, and performs occasional forensic psychological evaluations. She has been retained in civil, criminal, and administrative law cases across multiple jurisdictions. Consultations have included testifying for a national commission in Canada regarding the quality of a psychological assessment of a perpetrator in a mass casualty event; consulting on cognitive bias for an Olympic athlete's doping ban challenge for the Court for Arbitration of Sport, and evaluating the quality of a set of psychological evaluations conducted on a class of litigants in a major suit. 

Prior to joining the faculty at UNL, Dr. Neal was a Dean’s Associate Professor at Iowa State University and a tenured associate professor at Arizona State University. At ASU, she was the founding director of the Future of Forensic Science Initiative and co-founder of the Law and Behavioral Science Initiative, which received the 2020 President’s Award for Innovation. She has also received ASU’s Outstanding Mentor Award and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues’ Outstanding Teaching & Mentoring Award.