Dr. Beran is Professor of Psychology at Georgia State University and co-Director of the Language Research Center at Georgia State. He served from 2020-2024 as the Associate Chair of the Department of Psychology. He also is an associate member of the Neuroscience Institute and an affiliated faculty member of the Honors College. He received his B.A. from Oglethorpe University in 1997, his M.A. in 1999, and his Ph.D. in 2002, both from Georgia State. 

He is a Fellow of Division 3 and Division 6 of the American Psychological Association and a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society. He was the inaugural Duane M. Rumbaugh Fellow at Georgia State University.  He received the Brenda A. Milner award from the APA in 2005, and he was elected to Psi Chi in 1995 while an undergraduate. He has served as the President and the Treasurer of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology and on the Executive Councils of Division 3 and Division 6 of the APA and the Executive Council of the Southeastern Psychological Association (SEPA). He served as President of SEPA for 2018-2019 and as President of the Society for Comparative Psychology and Behavioral Neuroscience (Division 6 of the APA) for 2018-2019. He currently serves as Editor of the Journal of Comparative Psychology and serves on the editorial boards of Animal Behavior and Cognition, Cognition, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, Animal Cognition, Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews, Learning & Behavior, Frontiers in Comparative Psychology, and the International Journal of Comparative Psychology. 

In addition to service to the field, he has published in numerous areas, often because his students and colleagues had ideas too good not to pursue. There are numbers of those things (publications, etc.) but such counts really are not as important as enjoying doing science, working with amazing colleagues, and trying to have fun asking and answering questions. He has done a lot of that. To see details, click here for his full CV.

He regularly teaches Cognitive Psychology, Psychology of Learning, Natural Science Foundations of Psychology, and special topics courses such as his course on the Psychology of Good and Bad Decision Making.  He previously was an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at Spelman College from 2002-2005, and really enjoyed his time there.