Carmel Saad, Ph.D.
Senior Consultant
Dr. Carmel Saad is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Westmont College in Santa Barbara. She earned her bachelor’s degree in psychology from UC Santa Barbara. She earned her Ph.D. in social and personality psychology at UC Davis. Her work focuses on cultural competence, diversity, multicultural awareness, and bias.
Carmel aims to understand how to disrupt the impact of bias on behavior toward others to reduce disparities in real-world outcomes. She has adopted an evidence-based framework to help those in academic, law enforcement, healthcare, for-profit and nonprofit organizational contexts combat the effects of prejudice in their work.
Dr. Saad founded Carmel Saad Consulting in 2015, and through this private consulting firm, she and her team have helped organizations across a wide variety of sectors address racial disparities in outcomes in their fields. Her team facilitates sessions to help leaders and organizations better support underrepresented community members and mitigate the impact of bias in constructive ways. She works to understand organizations’ specific needs before training them on how to address these needs in an evidence-based way.
Throughout the design and implementation of their trainings, Dr. Saad and her team rely heavily on prejudice and discrimination research to demonstrate how biases can have serious consequences on behavior at an individual level and can contribute to larger disparities at a systemic level. They use a multifaceted prejudice attenuation and prevention program that frames the idea of prejudice as a habit that can be broken (Devine et al., 2012). They expand awareness of prejudice and its outcomes, focusing on how certain biases can lead individuals to unwittingly perpetuate discrimination. They equip participants with evidence-based strategies to disrupt the effects of bias on behavior and mitigate its impact on real-world outcomes. They give participants an opportunity to discuss and practice the strategies within the context of their own roles within their organizations. Moreover, Dr. Saad and her team often empirically assess the effectiveness of their anti-bias training programs.