KINGSTON, R.I. — Sept. 24, 2025 — With its growing collection of dynamic researchers and educators, its diverse curriculum, and the support from university administration and external donors typical of an R1 research institution, the URI Department of Psychology is poised to expand into a top-ranked program, according to new Department Chair David Schnyer, who helped elevate his previous psychology program into one of the nation’s best.
“There is a lot of potential here coming both from the ground-up, in terms of our faculty and students and their interest in taking things to the next level, but also from the top-down,” said Schnyer, who joined the College of Health Sciences department for the start of the 2025-26 academic year. “As an R1 university, we have a dual mission: research and education excellence. The president, provost, and dean are all very aligned in that mission, and I wanted to be a part of it. This is a really great place that has the tools needed to elevate it quite rapidly.”
Schnyer joined URI after 19 years at the University of Texas-Austin, the last six as chair of the highly ranked psychology department. He also served as research and development chair of UT’s Care Initiative for rehabilitation research and engineering; faculty member in psychology and the Institute for Neuroscience; department liaison for medical affairs; and associate director of education at UT’s Imaging Research Center. Previously, Schnyer was assistant professor of psychiatry at Boston University School of Medicine, and a research scientist at Massachusetts General Hospital and BU’s Memory Disorders Research Center.
URI’s recent designation as an R1 institution—the highest level of the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education, placing URI among the top 5 percent of degree-granting postsecondary institutions nationally—was key to Schnyer’s decision to join the university’s department of psychology and help “bring it into an R1 space.” URI has made significant progress in expanding its research enterprise, securing major funding, and fostering interdisciplinary collaboration across a broad range of fields. The College of Health Sciences includes multiple health disciplines, and faculty members routinely collaborate with other URI colleges, including the George & Anne Ryan Institute for Neuroscience, the colleges of Nursing and Engineering, and College of Pharmacy on the Interdisciplinary Neuroscience Program.
Schnyer brings a wealth of interdisciplinary experience. He plans to continue building relationships at URI with entities like the Ryan Institute as well as beyond the Kingston Campus. He has already started conversations on joint initiatives with researchers at the Carney Institute for Brain Science and Department of Cognitive and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, where research focuses more on behavioral neuroscience and less on clinical, a strength at URI, creating an obvious potential for collaboration. He is also working to establish a TRACK-TBI site in Rhode Island, a public-private network of researchers dedicated to Transforming Research And Clinical Knowledge in Traumatic Brain Injury, which Schnyer helped establish at UT Austin.
“All my work has always been very interdisciplinary across psychology, neuroscience, sometimes engineering, and medicine, and I hope to recreate that here,” Schnyer said. “That is the future of R1 institutions; interdisciplinary collaborations are what people are funding and interested in supporting, and Psychology is well positioned as a hub to build and support interdisciplinary research initiatives. There is a strong faculty here and they know how to get funded. You can see a base that is here; people who are excited about this place and where it can go.”
Schnyer said he made a concerted effort to boost funding efforts for faculty members at UT, creating faculty panels to review grant applications, collaborate on proposals, and provide support and advice on writing effective funding applications. He ensured solid connections between research and the educational mission of the department. Even the highest-funded faculty members would teach graduate and undergraduate classes each year, ensuring younger students gain important research experience early in their college careers.
Schnyer’s own research program centers around the cognitive neuroscience of mental processes, including traumatic brain injury, memory disorders, and how sleep contributes to wellbeing in mental health and cognition. He is also an expert in wearable technology and plans to add his experience to similar studies ongoing at URI. He established and will bring to URI the Psy Brain Lab, which examines the cognitive and neural systems that support memory and attention control in young and older healthy individuals, as well as those suffering from mental illness and traumatic brain injury.
“We need to provide as much research experience as we can to our undergraduate students through research courses or just recruiting student volunteers to work in our labs,” Schnyer said. “We put emphasis on being a top research department, but also transmitting that experience downward, not just to graduate students, but to undergraduate students. If you’re interested in graduate school in any STEM field, you want this research foundation.”
Schnyer plans to implement programs for faculty members in the department to collaborate on research projects, advise each other on competitive applications, and involve students heavily in research to continue the tradition into the future.
“Psychology has become a really popular major, but there is room for expansion,” Schnyer said, noting the UT-Austin psychology department tripled its research funding under his watch. “I want to make sure we have faculty who are active researchers and are getting recognized for what they’re doing. That will help raise the department’s prominence higher than it already is.”