Rate My Professor Kristina Olson

Prior to joining Princeton in 2020, Olson held faculty positions at Yale University as Assistant Professor of Psychology from 2008 to 2013 and at the University of Washington, where she advanced from Assistant Professor (2013-2015) to Associate Professor (2015-2019), Professor (2019-2020), and Earl R. Carlson Endowed Professor (2019-2020). She maintains affiliate faculty appointments in Cognitive Science at Princeton University and Psychology at the University of Washington. Olson has received prestigious awards, including the 2018 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2018 National Science Foundation Alan T. Waterman Award, the 2016 Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformational Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science, the 2019 Early Career Impact Award from the Society for Experimental Social Psychology, and the 2025 Princeton University Graduate Mentoring Award. Her influential publications include "Children’s Gender Five Years After Their Initial Childhood Social Transitions" (Pediatrics, 2022, with Durwood, L., Horton, R., Gallagher, N.M., & Devor, A.H.), "Similarity in transgender and cisgender children’s gender development" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019, with Gülgöz, S., et al.), "Mental health and self-worth in socially transitioned transgender youth" (Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 2017, with Durwood, L., & McLaughlin, K.A.), and "Gender Identity 5 Years After Social Transition" (Pediatrics, 2022). With over 13,995 citations on Google Scholar, her research has significantly advanced understanding of social cognitive development, particularly in transgender and gender diverse youth.