Gen Tsudaka, Ph.D.

Born in Japan and educated in the United States, I study how landscapes, histories, and institutions shape how we think, feel, and act.

In fall 2026, I’ll be moving to Shanghai to join NYU Shanghai’s Center for Applied Social and Economic Research (CASER) as a postdoctoral fellow, studying how changing environments shape human development, well-being, and collective life across China and beyond.

I received my Ph.D. in cognitive, social, and developmental psychology from The New School for Social Research. My dissertation, Homo Loci, examined how relocation history shapes identity, memory formation, and prosocial behavior. It introduced placefulness: the degree to which the self is psychologically anchored to particular environments. I received the Irvin Rock Memorial Award, and the dissertation was named a finalist for the IACCP Harry C. Triandis Doctoral Thesis Award.

My work combines infant studies, cross-cultural surveys, geospatial analysis, and computational modeling. I collaborate with Michael Morris and colleagues at Columbia Business School; Lawrence Hirschfeld at the Center for Research with Infants and Toddlers; Martin Obschonka at the University of Amsterdam; and Masaki Yuki and colleagues at Hokkaido University.

With collaborators, I founded Stronglight, a research foundry developing cultural models of organizations and regions. Our aim is to understand how shared norms and institutional structures shape behavior and respond to changing conditions.

I am happiest among people who take cultural context seriously, cross disciplinary boundaries, and pursue questions that call for new theories and methods.

You can reach me at tsudaka [at] pm.me.