Alejandro Lleras is the Associate Dean for Inclusive Excellence in the College of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He has been a standing member of the US National Committee for Psychological Science since 2022, and a member of the Executive Committee for the International Union of Psychological Science (IUPSYS). He is a founder and governing board member of the Spark Society, a non-profit to increase the participation and visibility of historically-excluded groups in the cognitive sciences. He received an Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation and a Mid-Career Award from the Psychonomic Society, the pre-eminent professional society for cognitive psychology. He is a Fellow in the Association for Psychological Science and in the Psychonomic Society. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the Pennsylvania State University and was an NSF-funded minority postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, Canada. Alejandro completed his undergraduate degree in Engineering Sciences in France, at the École Centrale De Lyon, thanks to an academic excellence scholarship from the French Government. He completed his early schooling in Bogotá, Colombia.
Professor Lleras is an expert in cognitive psychology, with a specialisation in the understanding of attention and distraction. He uses behavioral and eye-tracking techniques, and has expertise in computational and mathematical approaches to modeling human behavior. He recently co-authored a review for Nature Reviews Psychology on the role and constraints that peripheral vision plays when humans look for information in the environment. He also conducted one of the first studies documenting the negative impact of smartphones and the internet on mental health in a large US sample. Through his service, he has also become an expert on issues of equity in science and broadening participation, securing close to $5 million dollars in grants from the National Science Foundation to work on these issues. He is also a member of the working group on Equity in Science at the International Union for Psychological Science.