Ph.D., Social Psychology

Aanchal Setia

Studied how people navigate assigned and professional identities, belonging, and upward mobility.

Aanchal Setia is a Data Scientist at Meta. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she studied how members of disadvantaged groups navigate identities assigned to them at birth, such as race and gender, alongside their professional identities in high-achievement contexts. Her research examined how navigating these potentially misaligned identities shapes experiences of belonging and identity threat, as well as the strategies people use to pursue upward mobility. She used a variety of methodological approaches, including computational methods, experiments, and survey research, to investigate these questions across social and professional contexts.