Mona Sue Weissmark is an American clinical psychologist and social psychologist, whose work on the inter-generational impact of injustice has received international recognition. She is best known for her groundbreaking social experiment of bringing children of Holocaust survivors face-to-face with children of Nazis, and later, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of African American slaves with slave owners.
She is also a professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and author of numerous journal articles and three books: Doing Psychotherapy Effectively (University of Chicago Press) and Justice Matters: Legacies of the Holocaust and World War II (Oxford University Press), and The Science of Diversity™ (Oxford University Press).
Weissmark received a bachelor’s degree at McGill University in 1977 and a doctorate degree at the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. She went on to pursue a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University from 1987 until 1990, and in 1991 became a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, teaching graduate courses on research methods. In 1994, she moved to Chicago and joined the faculty at Roosevelt University as a tenured associate professor of Psychology (1994–2005) and also joined the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University as a visiting scholar (1994–2003).
In 2004, Weissmark was named Visiting Associate Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University and founded the Global Mental Health Studies Program part of The Buffett Institute, where she now teaches “Psychology of Diversity” and conducts research on the psychology of justice. She also is a visiting professor of Psychology at Harvard University where she also teaches “Psychology of Diversity.”
Weissmark was born in Vineland, New Jersey. She lives in Evanston, Illinois with her husband a University of Chicago psychiatrist. They have one daughter.