Alison Gopnik

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology, affiliate professor of philosophy, and member of the Berkeley Artificial Intelligence Research Group at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1988. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD from Oxford University. She is a world leader in cognitive science, particularly the study of learning and development and in 2024 she was awarded the Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition. She is the author of over 150 journal articles and several books including the co-authored and critically acclaimed The Scientist in the Crib (1999), The Philosophical Baby (2009) and The Gardener and the Carpenter (2016). She is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and past president of the Association for Psychological Science.

She has written widely about cognitive science and psychology for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, New Scientist, The New Yorker, Science, and Slate, among other journals. She has frequently appeared on television and radio and her TED talk has been viewed over 5.4 million times.