# Melissa Ferguson

Melissa J. Ferguson is an American professor of psychology and was a Senior Associate Dean of Social Sciences at Cornell University before becoming a professor at Yale University in 2020. She is known for her work on how people form and evolve their interpretations of social events, and how people recognize and evaluate information like fake news. Ferguson's research shows that information consumers can avoid misinformation by focusing on the quality of its source.A 2018 study Ferguson published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America examined the tendency for people to refer to male professionals by their last names far more often than female professionals.