Izzy Gainsburg

Izzy Gainsburg is a social psychologist and Associate Director of the Politics and Social Change Lab. There, Gainsburg helps lead the lab’s research program, cultivate partnerships with government and civil-society organizations, translate findings for practitioners and the public, and chart PASCL’s strategic direction.

His scholarship clusters around three threads:

1. Prosocial messaging & intervention design – crafting and experimentally testing communications that boost cooperation, compassion, and civic engagement.
2. The social psychology of AI – investigating AI’s persuasive capacities, its potential to promote well-being, and ways the technology can accelerate social science.
3. Meta-science & field-building – mapping high-impact research questions and creating infrastructure to guide scholars toward the most societally valuable interventions.

Before Stanford, Gainsburg was a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School and the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. He earned his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Michigan (2020) and a B.A. in Psychology from Tufts University (2011).

Outside the lab, you'll find him spending time with family and friends, playing all the sports, improvising dishes in the kitchen, and doing various nature-y things in nature.