President-Elect (Beginning in June 2021)

Alison Gopnik

University of California, Berkeley

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology, affiliate professor of philosophy, and member of The Berkeley AI Research group at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD from Oxford University.

She is a leader in cognitive science and the study of children’s learning and development, and she was one of the founders of the field of “theory of mind,” an originator of the “theory theory” of children’s development, and the person who introduced the idea that probabilistic models and Bayesian inference could be applied to children’s learning.

She is an elected member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences and an APS, Cognitive Science Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Guggenheim Fellow. She has been continuously supported by the NSF.

She is the author of over 120 journal articles and several books including the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby, and The Gardener and the Carpenter. She has written widely about cognitive science and psychology for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Scientific American, The New York Review of Books, New Scientist and Slate, among others.

Her TED Talk on her work has been viewed more than 4.7 million times. She has frequently appeared on TV and radio including The Charlie Rose Show, The Colbert Report, Radio Lab, and The Ezra Klein Show. Since 2013 she has written the “Mind and Matter” column for the Wall Street Journal.

She has also consulted with governments and NGOs about the importance of child development and caregiving—an issue whose political moment has finally arrived and where APS could play a major role—and has been a strong advocate for better and broader science communication, another APS focus.

Members-at-Large (Beginning in June 2021)

Tania Lombrozo

Princeton University

Tania Lombrozo is Arthur W. Marks ’19 Professor of Psychology at Princeton University, where she directs the Concepts and Cognition Lab. She is also a faculty associate of Princeton’s Department of Philosophy and University Center for Human Values. Lombrozo’s research aims to address foundational questions about cognition using the empirical tools of cognitive psychology and the conceptual tools of analytic philosophy. Her work focuses on explanation and understanding, conceptual representation, categorization, social cognition, causal reasoning, and folk epistemology. She is the recipient of numerous early-career awards, including the Stanton Prize from the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, an Early Investigator Award from the Society of Experimental Psychologists, a Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career contributions from the American Psychological Association, the Joseph B. Gittler Award from the American Psychological Foundation, a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation, and a James S. McDonnell Foundation Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. In addition to writing for an academic audience, she regularly writes for a general audience. From 2012 to 2018, she was a (bi)weekly blogger for NPR, covering topics in psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science. Lombrozo hopes to support APS’s mission to engage with the public in supporting a better and deeper understanding of science, including its role in decision making at individual and societal levels. She is also committed to improving research practices and reducing barriers to diverse participation in the field. 

Eric-Jan (EJ) Wagenmakers

University of Amsterdam

Eric-Jan (EJ) Wagenmakers is Professor of Psychological Methods at the University of Amsterdam. Wagenmakers is a Fellow of the APS and a past member of the APS Annual Convention Program committee (2014-2016). He has served as an action-editor for the Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, Cognitive Psychology, and PLoS Biology. He is a past president of the Society for Mathematical Psychology, whose annual meeting he helped organize in 2009. Wagenmakers’s current research interests center on cognitive modeling, Bayesian inference, and philosophy of science. He is also the founder and director of JASP (jasp-stats.org), a free and open-source software program for statistical analyses. Wagenmakers would like APS to solidify and expand its role in improving the quality and dependability of psychological science. This may require more training (e.g., online workshop series), more quantitative modeling (e.g., through increased interaction with adjacent fields), and more transparency (e.g., through many-analysts approaches). At the Annual Convention, EJ would like APS to explore ways in which to highlight the contributions of early career researchers.