Biography

Chris L. Heavey is the president of UNLV. As the chief executive officer, he provides overall leadership and strategic direction for the university. Prior to this role, he was UNLV’s executive vice president and provost for six years and held a variety of other executive leadership positions.

Heavey is also a professor of psychology whose research focuses on understanding the inner experience and its relationship to mental health. He is one of the nation’s leading scholars in the thoughts and feelings that make up the consciousness of people as they go about their everyday lives. His work has helped shed light on the experiences of people who suffer from mental illnesses, including depression, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Additionally, Heavey uses the Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) method to explore the experience of people who share a common feature, such as those suffering from depression, as well as the characteristics and phenomena of normal, unaltered consciousness. Other topics of interest include how inner experience relates to other psychological constructs (e.g., personality, emotional intelligence, etc.), exploring the experience of naturally-occurring emotions, and how methodological variations in procedures used to research inner experience influence findings.