Syeda Ullah Behavioral EconomicsBITSS CatalystPsychology
Syeda Ullah is a PhD student in Management at the University of California, San Diego. Her research examines how gender, emotion, and culture shape workplace experiences and career outcomes. She is particularly interested in how expectations of emotional and cognitive labor influence leadership, mentorship, and decisions about career advancement.
She is currently leading two research projects. The first investigates how leader expressions of gratitude affect workplace perceptions and behaviors, with an emphasis on how such dynamics shape relationships and organizational functioning. The second examines the impact of cognitive labor on women’s career decisions, focusing on how the invisible demands of managing mental load influence aspirations, advancement, and well-being at work. Together, these projects aim to shed light on the psychological and cultural processes that sustain inequality in organizations and to identify pathways toward more equitable and supportive workplaces.
In addition to these projects, Syeda Ullah is committed to promoting research transparency and reproducibility in the social sciences.
In addition, she is spearheading an initiative at UC San Diego to integrate open science practices into graduate training, combining formal coursework with interdisciplinary workshops and freely accessible recorded resources. This effort is designed to equip early-career researchers across management, psychology, sociology, and related disciplines with practical tools to enhance the rigor, credibility, and impact of their work.
Looking ahead, Syeda Ullah seeks to advance both academic scholarship and applied organizational solutions that foster inclusion, transparency, and effectiveness in diverse workplace contexts.