In 2004, with her reputation yet to be widely established, she organized an unprecedented conference at Stanford on racial bias in policing, bringing together scores of academics from across the country with law enforcement officials from 34 agencies in 13 states.

“Somehow she got us all together, and she got these major city chiefs and sheriffs to show up with an open mind,” says Jack Glaser, a social psychologist at University of California, Berkeley. “She ... made this opportunity, which just didn’t exist before. I really don’t know how she pulled it off.”

Eberhardt’s feat required not just bridging camps with little history of dialogue, but also disregarding the pressures of a profession not set up to reward hand-in-hand work with real-world practitioners. Her persistence, though, has borne fruit for her and others who have followed.

“There was not a field of social psychology and criminal justice, and then there was Jennifer Eberhardt, and then there was a field,” says UCLA professor Phillip Goff, a former student of Eberhardt’s and a collaborator on some of her most noted studies. “She made it possible for other folks to come after her.”

He includes himself in that group. His work as co-founder and president of the Center for Policing Equity at UCLA, which fosters collaboration between police and social scientists, is riding the momentum Eberhardt created at the 2004 conference and again at a 2007 conference held at Stanford.

“She made it possible for those of us who cared about black lives to do work that was relevant to policy, but that social psychologists could recognize as their own,” Goff says. “I can’t even express to you how nontrivial that accomplishment is.”

While other scientists have also made major advances in implicit bias research, it is Eberhardt who brought the science to police, says Fridell, who now heads her own business training law enforcement officers across the United States and Canada to recognize and mitigate their biases. “I wouldn’t be doing this but for Jennifer Eberhardt.”

Key to the training’s appeal, Fridell says, is that it treats bias as a common human condition to be recognized and managed, rather than as a deeply offensive personal sin, an approach that makes cops less defensive. “They understand that it is a real issue with which they need to deal, but not because the profession is made up of ill-intentioned individuals with explicit biases (e.g., racists), but because the profession is comprised of humans,” she said in an email.

Still, that very same message—the ubiquity of implicit bias—can lend an added grimness to Eberhardt’s work. Racial bias against African Americans isn’t confined to the past or the South or police or even whites. It seeps into everything, a point Eberhardt sometimes uses personal anecdote to reinforce.