Alison Gopnik

Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, where she has taught since 1988. She is leading the CASBS project on “The Social Science of Caregiving” along with Margaret Levi and Zachary Ugolnik. She is a world leader in cognitive science, known for her work in the areas of learning and cognitive development. Gopnik is the author of over 100 journal articles and several books including the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books The Scientist in the Crib, The Philosophical Baby: What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life (Picador, 2010), and The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016). She is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Her most recent work is Caregiving in Philosophy, Biology & Political Economy, published in Daedalus (2023).

Gopnik writes the Mind and Matter science column for the Wall Street Journal, and she has also written widely about cognitive science and psychology for The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Science, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, New Scientist and Slate, among others. She has frequently appeared on TV and radio including “The Charlie Rose Show” “The Colbert Report” and “Radio Lab”. Her TED talk has been seen over 5.2 million times.  Gopnik was a CASBS fellow in 2003-04.