Psychology Professor Ian Lyons Awarded Magis Prize for Math and Brain Research

Math is extremely useful. It’s a part of people’s daily lives, from cooking and shopping to financial planning and making medical decisions. But for a lot of people, math can be stressful. Even the thought of doing math can make them feel anxious.

Instead of using math, they avoid it. 

Ian Lyons, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology and principal investigator of the Math Brain Lab, knows that and wants to make math “less not fun.” 

“If we can make it something where this doesn’t have to be your favorite thing that you do every day but just feel better about it, feel more confident about it and reduce that negative emotional experience that you have, then that will hopefully improve quality of life right then and there,” he said. 

Lyons is one of three professors to receive the Magis Prize this year. The award, which is in its second year, recognizes early-stage associate professors of exceptional creativity who are making a profound impact in their field. Winners receive $100,000 to support their research and two semesters of research leave. 

Lyons said he was delighted and excited to receive the award, in part because it will provide opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students working in his lab.

“Our lab is fundamentally a team sport,” he said. “We have graduate students. We have postdocs. … We have quite a few undergraduate research assistants, and every single one of them is absolutely integral.” 

In the Math Brain Lab, Lyons uses concepts and tools from developmental psychology, cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience to understand how people acquire, use and teach math.

“We study how the brain does mathematics,” he said. “We don’t just use neuroscience. We use a whole range of different approaches to understand math from a lot of different perspectives.”

Current research suggests that basic math skills are a gateway to more financially lucrative career paths and provide decisive advantages outside of one’s professional life, Lyons wrote in his proposal. Having those skills is also a core part of maintaining financial independence across adulthood and into old age, he said.

In his project for the Magis Prize, Lyons aims to understand how prolonged math avoidance alters math skills across four years of a college student’s undergraduate career. His lab has found that math anxious college students avoid courses and activities that they perceive involve science or math and that math anxiety was the strongest predictor of the number of math courses taken. 

Lyons’ current project will expand on these findings and investigate the consequences of prolonged math avoidance. 

“Focusing on math avoidance across four years in college students will allow us to make robust inferences about how one’s choices during this time form the foundation for decades of adulthood,” Lyons wrote in his proposal. “By identifying who is most likely to avoid math and the neural mechanisms that drive this avoidance, we will identify high-leverage opportunities for intervention.”

Lyons has worked at Georgetown since 2016 and became an associate professor in 2023. He was previously a postdoctoral fellow and adjunct professor in developmental psychology at the University of Western Ontario. He earned his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from the University of Chicago. 

As a scientist, Lyons has always been interested in how the brain works. At the University of Chicago, he was working in Sian Beilock’s lab when she was studying math anxiety. Lyons said he decided around that time to look into what happens to a math anxious person’s brain when they’re doing math. From there, he started to explore the behavioral components of math anxiety, such as math avoidance.

“How people feel about what they’re doing can be really important, and it can be even more important for understanding what they choose not to do,” Lyons said. “This has led me to study the emotional aspects of math, especially how those emotions might make a person want to avoid doing math.”

Lyons describes his own math skills as “adequate.” Math, to him, is a tool, and using that tool is a skill that requires practice. Having those skills can give people an advantage.

“It’s valuable to be able to feel comfortable doing basic math,” Lyons said. “It just opens up so many more doors.”