Dr. Nell Putnam-Farr to Present MCLA Green Living Seminar Series Talk March 10

NORTH ADAMS, MA—Dr. Nell Putnam-Farr, assistant professor of marketing at Rice University, will give a talk titled “Framing Messages to Make Them Appealing” as part of MCLA’s Green Living Seminar Series at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 10, 2021. 

Green Living Seminar Series webinars are free and open to the public; community members can register for each lecture at mcla.edu/greenliving. All seminars take place weekly on Wednesdays at 5:30 p.m. through April 14. 

Dr. Putnam-Farr is an assistant professor at Rice’s Jones Graduate School of Business. Her research focuses primarily on how framing and contextual cues impact decision making and satisfaction. Within this domain, she considers how framing might have different effects on immediate decisions versus long term satisfaction and persistence, how contextual clues impact expectations and satisfaction, and how intercepting people at the “right” point in the decision process can impact attention and behavior. She works with company partners in the consumer packaged goods, wellness, and financial services sectors, focusing on how to improve financial and physical well-being. She relies on a combination of lab and field experiments—usually testing in the field with a corporate or nonprofit partners and then working to determine a mechanism and/or boundary conditions in the lab. 

Before coming to the Jones School, Nell spent three years doing research with company partners at the Yale Center for Customer Insights. She received her MBA and PhD from the MIT Sloan School of Management and a BA with Honors in Economics from Williams College. Before coming to academia, she spent eight years working in the financial services industry being fascinated and frustrated by the psychology of investing behavior. 

Every semester, MCLA’s Green Living Seminar Series hosts lectures by local, regional, and national experts organized around a central theme related to the environment and sustainability. The 2021 series theme is “Individual Actions and Environmental Sustainability.” The series is a presentation of the MCLA Environmental Studies Department and MCLA’s Berkshire Environmental Resource Center. 

For more information, go to www.mcla.edu/greenliving or contact Elena Traister at (413) 662-5303.