Dr. Phillip Atiba Solomon (f.k.a. Goff)

Dr. Phillip Atiba Solomon (f.k.a. Goff) is the Chair and Carl I. Hovland Professor of African American Studies and Professor of Psychology at Yale University. He received his AB from Harvard and PhD in Psychology from Stanford.

He quickly became a national leader in the science of racial bias by pioneering scientific experiments that exposed how our minds learn to associate Blackness and crime implicitly—often with deadly consequences.

Dr. Solomon co-founded the Center for Policing Equity (CPE) in 2007 as a research and action center at UCLA. Since then, CPE has become the nation’s leading organization working to eliminate racism in public safety. CPE has pioneered research methods, data-driven interventions, and community-centered redesigns of public safety systems to reduce the drivers of racially disparate policing and reduce state burdens on Black and Brown communities.

CPE also hosts the world’s largest collection of police behavioral data in the National Science Foundation-funded National Justice Database. This database now serves as a tool to reduce burdensome and inequitable policing through evidence-driven interventions. Dr. Solomon has won two American Psychological Association early career awards, the Association for Psychological Science Rising Star award, and the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executive’s Lloyd G. Sealy Award, and the Society of Experimental Social Psychology Career Trajectory Award among many others. He regularly appears on cable news, provides congressional testimony, and was a panelist for President Obama’s Task Force on 21st Century Policing.