Nancy L. Zingrone has a Bachelor of Arts with Honors in Psychology (Mundelein College), a Master of Science in Education specializing in higher education with a teaching specialty in psychology (Northern Illinois University), and was a doctoral candidate in History, specializing in the histories of science, medicine, and the social history of American women (Duke University). She completed her Ph.D. in Psychology (University of Edinburgh) where her dissertation utilized the methodologies of history and rhetoric of science and discursive psychology to study debates over the legitimacy of parapsychological research. (Photo taken in 2021)
She has conducted experimental ESP research, survey studies of psychic experiences, and an examination of texts in parapsychology from a science studies point of view.
She has been a part-time Professor in the Department of Psychology in the School of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Northcentral University since 2013, teaching masters and doctoral level courses in the foundations of graduate or doctoral study, research methods, applied statistics, the history of psychology, and personality theories. At the doctoral level, she also teaches scholarly writing, the sociocultural context of gender, and of family processes, and grant writing. In July of 2022, Northcentral University merged with National University (San Diego) and she is now a Core Distinguished part-time Professor in the J. F. Kennedy School of Psychology and Social Sciences. Zingrone recently re-started her teaching at NCU/NU after a seven-month leave that began when her best friend, colleague, and husband of 31 years, Carlos S. Alvarado, Ph.D., entered an at-home hospice program in June of 2021 and subsequently passed away on July 16th of that same year.
Due to the present circumstances, she is refocusing herself on augmenting her knowledge of the current terrain in parapsychology and consciousness and planning the return of the virtual teaching project The AZIRE (Alvarado Zingrone Institute of Research and Education). She is also preparing Alvarado’s papers for transfer to the University of West Georgia archive, and contributing to the planning and organization of a special issue of the Journal of the Anomalistics/Zeitschrift für on Anomalistik on women in parapsychology with Gerhard Mayer, Ph.D. and Cedar Sarilo Leverett as well as involved in the construction, distribution, and analysis of a survey of women’s experiences as workers in parapsychology and related fields. Recently, she has joined Edwin C. May, Ph.D., and Sonalia Marwaha, Ph.D. on their project gathering Alvarado’s English-language publications into a series of thematic volumes so that the materials will be easily available for future scholars. Finally, she has reoriented herself in her own scholarship to the histories of psychology, psychiatry and psychical research, with an emphasis on women in science and under the gaze of science. Her additional interest is in virtual worlds, virtual reality and augmented reality in higher education.
She is also posting occasionally to Alvarado’s Parapsychology: News, History, and Research, to her own blog, Thinking about Learning, and to Parapsychology Online, a website that supports the online course “Parapsychology Research and Education,” of project of hers and Alvarado’s from 2015 through 2020. The course restarted in 2023 with Bryan Williams of the Psychical Research Foundation and Natasha Chisdes of Chizfilm.com.
Back to Zingrone’s experience in the field, she was the Director of Publications at the Parapsychology Foundation and the Executive Editor of the International Journal of Parapsychology from 1999 through 2009. From 2003 to 2010, Zingrone was, like her deceased husband, an Assistant Professor of Research at the Division of Perceptual Studies in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences at the University of Virginia from 2003 to 2010. From 2010 through January of 2013, she was the Director of Academic and Administrative Affairs at Atlantic University. From the spring of 2013 through 2014, she was an online instructor at the Rhine Education Center.
From May of 2010 through March of 2014, she served on the Board of Directors for the Rhine Research Center. She also served on the Board of Directors of the Parapsychological Association from the mid-1990s through 2004 and was elected twice as President of the Parapsychological Association (in 2001-2002 and 2003-2004). She was the Vice President of the Academy of Consciousness and Spirituality Studies in 2016 and on the Board of Directors from June 2014 through 2016. She resigned from the ACSI in 2017 to find the time in her schedule to become a member of the Adjunct Faculty Council of the School of Psychology at Northcentral University. She served on that council until the summer of 2021.
Over her fifty-plus-year career in scientific parapsychology, she has published more than thirty papers, a few alone, most with Carlos S. Alvarado, and many other colleagues in parapsychology and education. Her publications have appeared in the Australian Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, the European Journal of Parapsychology, the journal Imagination, Cognition and Personality, the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, the Journal of Parapsychology, the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, among other periodicals. In addition to co-authoring chapters in the (2015) Parapsychology: Handbook for the 21st Century (McFarland, 2015) as well as in Extrasensory Perception: Support, Skepticism, and Science (Praeger, 2015), she also wrote a chapter in Women and Parapsychology (Parapsychology Foundation, 1994) and was a co-author of a chapter in the Handbook of Near-Death Experiences (Praeger, 2009). She is also one of the editors of Advances in Parapsychological Research 10 (McFarland, 2021).
Finally, in 2015 she was named a Research Fellow at the Parapsychology, an honorary post, and was also awarded the Outstanding Contribution Award for the Parapsychology Research and Education free online series (also known as ParaMOOC) from the Parapsychological Association. In 2021 she was awarded the Outstanding Student Engagement Teaching Excellence Award (part-time faculty) from the School of Social and Behavior Sciences of Northcentral University.