Anita Williams Woolley

Anita Williams Woolley is a Professor of Organizational Behavior and Theory at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. She holds a PhD in Organizational Behavior from Harvard Business School, alongside a BA and MA in Psychology and Social Psychology from Harvard University. Her research focuses on collective intelligence, particularly in human-AI collaboration, team coordination, and the cognitive foundations of group performance. She is a Senior Editor at Organization Science and a founding Associate Editor of Collective Intelligence.

Woolley’s work has been funded by DARPA, NSF, and the U.S. Army Research Office, including a $3M DARPA grant to advance artificial social intelligence. Her research has been published in top journals like Science, PNAS, and Nature Human Behavior. She explores how transactive memory systems, collective attention, and team composition enhance group performance, with recent studies on vocal and facial synchrony in teams and the impact of gender diversity on intelligence.

• Educations:
  • PhD in Organizational Behavior, Harvard Business School
  • MA in Social Psychology, Harvard University
  • BA in Psychology, Harvard University

Her research has practical implications for distributed teams and AI integration, including studies on hybrid intelligence and the design of collaborative tools. She co-leads the CI@CMU Lab and has advised organizations on optimizing team dynamics. Personal interests include fostering gender equality in science, as highlighted in her work on team diversity and the establishment of the Joe and Connie Williams Scholarship in her hometown.

Woolley has held roles such as Associate Dean for Research at Tepper School (2022–2024) and has taught courses on managing teams and global collaboration. Her contributions extend to policy and public discourse on AI ethics and human-AI collaboration.