Quick Facts
Biography
Laurie Santos (born 1975) is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University. Her research explores the evolutionary origins of the human mind by comparing the cognitive abilities of humans and non-human animals, including primates and canines. She is the Director of the Canine Cognition Lab at Yale. She has been a featured TED speaker, and has been listed in Popular Science Magazine as one of their “Brilliant 10” young minds in 2007, and in Time magazine as a “Leading Campus Celebrity” in 2013. In June 2016, she was named the Head of Silliman College, one of the 14 undergraduate residential colleges at Yale, succeeding Nicholas Christakis.
Biography
Education and employment
Santos was born in 1975 in New Bedford, Massachusetts to a family of Cape Verdean descent. She attended New Bedford High School, and went on to obtain her Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude in Psychology and Biology from Harvard University in 1997, winning the annual Psychology Department Undergraduate Thesis Prize. She continued her studies as graduate student in the Harvard Psychology Department, obtaining a Ph.D in Psychology in 2003 with a focus on Cognition, Brain and Behavior. Her dissertation won the Richard J. Herrnstein Dissertation Prize of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences for “the best dissertation that exhibits excellent scholarship, originality and breadth of thought, and a commitment to intellectual independence.”
In 2003, she began as an Assistant Professor in Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University, earning tenure as an Associate Professor in 2009.
Santos is married to the philosopher Mark Maxwell. She is the sister of author and physicist Aaron Santos.
Honors and awards
In 2007, Santos was featured in Popular Science Magazine as one of the journal’s “Brilliant 10” Young Scientists. In 2008, she was awarded the Stanton Prize for outstanding early-career contributions to interdisciplinary research in Philosophy and Psychology by Society for Philosophy and Psychology. In 2008, she was awarded the Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Junior Faculty at Yale University. In 2010, she was a featured speaker at the TED Global Conference in Oxford, UK.
In 2011, she was featured as the Association for Psychological Science Presidential Symposium Speaker. In 2012, she was awarded the Lex Hixon Prize for teaching excellence in the social sciences at Yale University. In 2013, she was voted as one of Magazine’s leading campus celebrities.