Andrea Gurmankin Levy
Professor & Program Coordinator, Psychology
Phone: 860-343-5815
Email: alevy@mxcc.edu 
Office Location: Snow Hall 508
Schedule an appointment
Courses:
- HON*F102 Honors Seminar II
- PSY*F103 Intro to Holistic Wellness
- PSY*F111 General Psychology I
- PSY F240 Social Psychology
Like all skills, studying, writing, critical thinking and learning take hard work and practice, and that is why Assistant Professor Andrea Gurmankin Levy pushes her students and holds them to a high standard.
Professor Levy earned a doctorate in psychology and a master’s degree in bioethics from the University of Pennsylvania. She was previously a professor at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, Harvard School of Public Health and at the University of Saint Joseph. She also holds a bachelor of arts in biology and society from Cornell University.
Her research focuses on the miscommunication between health care providers and patients. She has conducted studies demonstrating significant gaps between what the provider communicates and what the patient hears. She recently conducted a series of studies that are revealing a significant number of patients deliberately withhold important medical information from their health care providers (e.g., being depressed or suicidal, taking a certain medication, using drugs or alcohol, etc.), and that their reasons for doing so include being embarrassed, not wanting to be judged or lectured, and not wanting to have to make a difficult change, etc. When patients do not understand information from their providers, and when providers do not have accurate information from patients, suboptimal medical decisions may be made, and it is this concern that motivates Andrea’s research.
In the classroom, Dr. Levy focuses her teaching on topics such as social psychology, judgment and decision-making, health psychology and research and writing, because of the significant value and broad applicability that these topics have to students’ lives. For example, by teaching students about common errors and biases in judgment and decision-making, she can improve students’ decision-making in their lives as students, friends, partners, consumers, employees, (future) employers and patients. More generally, she pushes her students and holds them students to a high standard, but does so while holding their hand every step of the way and making the classroom a casual and fun environment. And the academic and personal growth that students experience as a result of their efforts is deeply rewarding for both her and them.
Dr. Levy is affiliated with the Society for the Teaching of Psychology and the American Psychological Association. When she’s not working, she is raising her two daughters. When time permits, she loves to play sports, read and be with friends.
Selected Publications/Presentations:
Gurmankin Levy A, Scherer AM, Zikmund-Fisher BJ, Larkin K, Barnes G, Fagerlin A. Dishonesty in patient disclosures to healthcare providers. JAMA Network Open 2018; 1(7):e185293. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2018.5293
Gurmankin Levy A, Hershey JC. The value-induced bias in medical decisions. Medical Decision Making 2008; 28(2): 269-276.
Gurmankin Levy A, Sonnad SS, Kurichi JE, Sherman M, Armstrong K. Making sense of cancer risk calculators on the web. Journal of General Internal Medicine 2008; 23(3): 229-235
Gurmankin Levy A, Weinstein ND, Kidney E, Scheld S, Guarnaccia P. Lay and expert evaluations of cancer clusters. Journal of Risk Analysis 2008; 28(6): 1531-1538.
Gurmankin AD, Domchek S, Stopfer J, Fels C, & Armstrong K. Patients’ resistance to risk information in genetic counseling for BRCA1/2. Archives of Internal Medicine 2005; 165: 523-9. (Brief reprinted in Nature Clinical Practice Oncology 2005, 2, 226)
Gurmankin AD. Risk information provided to prospective egg donors in a preliminary phone call. American Journal of Bioethics 2001; 1(4), 3-13.
Gurmankin AD, Baron J, Hershey JC & Ubel PA. The role of physicians’ recommendations in medical treatment decisions. Medical Decision Making 2002; 22(3), 262-271.
