Alison Gopnik is a professor of psychology and affiliate professor of philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, and a member of the Berkeley AI Research Group. She received her BA from McGill University and her PhD from Oxford University. She is a leader in cognitive science, particularly the study of children’s learning and development. She was one of the founders of the field of “theory of mind”, an originator of the “theory theory” of cognitive development, and the first to apply Bayesian probabilistic models to children’s learning. She has received the APS Lifetime Achievement, Cattell, and William James Awards, the Bradford Washburn Award for Science Communication, the SRCD Lifetime Achievement Award for Basic Science in Child Development, and the Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Foundations of Cognitive Science. She is an elected member of the Society of Experimental Psychologists and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Cognitive Science Society, American Association for the Advancement of Science, and Guggenheim Fellow. She was 2022-23 President of the Association for Psychological Science.

She is the author or coauthor of over 150 journal articles and several books including Words, thoughts and theories, MIT Press, 1997, and the bestselling and critically acclaimed popular books, The Scientist in the Crib, William Morrow, 1999, The Philosophical Baby: What children’s minds tell us about love, truth and the meaning of life, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009, and The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2016, the latter two awarded the Cognitive Development Society Best Book Prize in 2009 and 2016. She has also written widely about cognitive science and psychology for The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Economist, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Scientific American, The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, New Scientist, and Slate, among others. Her TED talk on her work has been viewed more than 5.5 million times. She has frequently appeared on TV, radio, and podcasts including “The Charlie Rose Show”, “The Colbert Report”, “Radio Lab”, and "The Ezra Klein Show".