Alia J. Crum

Alia J. Crum is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Medicine within Primary Care and Population Health. She directs the Mind and Body Lab, where her research examines how subjective mindsets—such as beliefs, expectations, and interpretations—can shape objective outcomes through behavioral, psychological, and physiological pathways. Her work is deeply informed by research on the placebo effect and extends these principles beyond medicine into domains including exercise, diet, stress, and organizational performance. She investigates how selective information conveyed through media, marketing, and labeling influences mindsets, and how these mindsets can be deliberately changed through targeted interventions to improve health, wellbeing, and performance. Her research integrates perspectives from psychology, behavioral economics, sociology, and neuroscience, employing methods ranging from controlled experiments to field interventions and clinical trials. She collaborates broadly across disciplines and is affiliated with Bio-X, the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, the Maternal & Child Health Research Institute, and the Stanford Cancer Institute.