ABOVE: UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
Darby Saxbe got her start in psychology research early. A self-described “nerdy kid,” she did a science fair study in seventh grade in which she gave left-handed people who wrote with a “hooked” posture and right-handed people a visual test to compare their perception in their left and right visual fields. “I’ve always been sort of curious [about] what makes people different from each other,” she explains.
Growing up in the college town of Oberlin, Ohio, it was easy to envision a career in academia, but Saxbe wasn’t completely sold. When she enrolled at Yale University in 1995, she originally majored in English. After realizing that career prospects for would-be English professors weren’t promising, she gravitated back toward psychology, and graduated with a double major. She moved to New York, working for tech startups and as a freelance writer, but the crash of the dot-com ...
