BINGHAMTON, NY – "Leadership and the Dark Side of Personality" will be the topic of the Binghamton University Forum luncheon program on Thursday, Jan. 15. A luncheon buffet will begin at 11:30 a.m. and the formal program will start at noon in the Old Union Hall of the University Union, on campus.

Seth Spain, assistant professor of organizational behavior and leadership at Binghamton University, will speak on the assessment of adult development in personality and the role that identity, especially the dark side of the human disposition, plays in leadership. CNN.com, Time.com, Inc.com and The Wall Street Journal have featured Spain’s work. The Wall Street Journal article based on his research, "What corporate climbers can teach us," was one of the most popular articles on wsj.com. He has appeared on CBS This Morning and National Public Radio’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook, among other media outlets.

Spain holds a PhD in industrial/organizational psychology with a minor in quantitative psychology from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Prior to joining the Binghamton University faculty in 2011, he was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute for Innovative Leadership in the College of Business Administration of the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. In addition to his teaching and research at Binghamton University, Spain is also an expert blogger for Psychology Today magazine.

He has nearly a decade of experience working on large analysis projects for industry, government and military organizations, including an independent evaluation of the US Army’s Comprehensive Soldier Fitness project. His research focuses on the assessment of individual differences and their role in leadership, especially the dark side of personality, the dynamics of job performance, and research methods, particularly statistical learning theory and Bayesian analysis. His research has appeared in numerous academic journals, including Personnel Psychology, Multivariate Behavioral Research, Organizational Research Methods, Journal of Organizational Behavior and the Leadership Quarterly. He has served as a methodology reviewer for the National Science Foundation, and he serves on the editorial boards of The Leadership Quarterly and the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies. He is recognized as an emerging expert on the analysis of organizational data and will give an invited talk on uncertainty in regression models to the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology in 2015.

The Binghamton University Forum is a membership organization comprised of business, professional and community leaders that brings nationally known authorities to speak at functions throughout the year. For more information, call the Forum office at (607) 777-4390.