Valerie Purdie Greenaway

Valerie Purdie Greenaway, who has also published under the surnames Purdie-Vaughns and Purdie, is an American social psychologist and associate professor of psychology at Columbia University. Her research interests include diversity, stereotypes and intergroup relations. She is one of the first African Americans to receive tenure in the academic sciences at Columbia University, and is credited with coining the term "intersectional invisibility".

Education and career Purdie Greenaway grew up in Brentwood, New York. She attended Columbia College for her undergraduate education, where she also played varsity basketball.

Purdie Greenaway was also a research fellow for Columbia's Institute for Research on African-American Studies.

Research Purdie Greenaway's laboratory group uses an interdisciplinary approach to study a wide range of topics that assess how social groups and human behavior interact. Some of the lab's research topics include social identity threat, dialogues regarding historic injustice, and racial health disparities. This article is significant for giving name to the psychological concept of intersectional invisibility. This concept posits that individuals with multiple subordinate-group or non-prototypical identities tend to be overlooked. The subordinate-group member is rendered invisible through mechanisms such as historical narratives, cultural understandings, interest group politics, and legal frameworks. Researchers conducted five studies to determine how salience to stereotypes might affect visual processing for their sample of both police officers and civilians. Previous literature has demonstrated how racial bias affects participants' judgement-making processes, specifically relating Blacks with crime (876). The concept of rejection sensitivity was developed by another team of researchers to indicate how rejection can influence an individual's relationships with others. Purdie Greenaway and her colleagues looked at this cognitive process as it relates to African Americans attending predominantly White educational institutions. In 2018, she presented at the Tory Burch Foundation's first Embrace Ambition Summit.

Personal life Greenaway is married to former United States Circuit Judge Joseph A. Greenaway Jr.