Texas A&M professor and administrator named interim head of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Heather Lench, PhD, has been named interim head of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Texas A&M University College of Medicine, effective Jan. 1, 2025. 

Lench brings significant scholarly and administrative leadership experience to the role. She joined the faculty of what is now the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences as an assistant professor in 2007 and was promoted to full professor in 2017, after also having served as the department’s associate head and head. In addition, since 2022 she has held the position of senior associate provost in Faculty Affairs, which facilitates the university’s faculty recruitment, development and retention activities. 

“Dr. Lench brings a wealth of valuable experience and institutional knowledge in strategic planning, evaluation processes and decision making that will greatly benefit our department during this period of transition,” said Amy Waer, MD, FACS, MPSA ‘23, Jean and Tom McMullin Endowed Dean of the College of Medicine.  

In the interim department head role, Lench will provide leadership for the department’s teaching and research efforts, as well as its delivery of psychiatric and psychological care across central Texas through an outpatient psychiatry clinic and a telebehavioral care network. 

Lench’s research focuses on the impact of emotions and intuitions on thinking and behavior. In her Emotion Science Lab, she and her team investigate topics including how people think about the future and when and why specific emotions might improve functioning and decision making. Her research has received more than $2.2 million from the National Science Foundation and Texas A&M since 2012, and her research findings have been promoted worldwide through outlets such as NPR, BBC and Wired.  

Her numerous awards and honors include being named a Department Head Development Fellow, a working group of six Texas A&M department heads selected to develop programming and support for the university’s administrative leadership (2019-2020); a scholar in the Happiness, Virtue, and Meaning of Life project, a working group focused on interdisciplinary research on those topics and funded by the John Templeton Foundation (2015-2017); and the American Psychological Association’s New Investigator Award in Experimental Psychology (2010). 

Lench earned a bachelor’s degree from Florida State University, a master’s degree from California State University, Fresno and a PhD from the University of California, Irvine.