Alison Gopnik, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Megan Gunnar, a Regents Professor and director of the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota, received the James McKeen Cattell Fellow Award from the Association for Psychological Science. The award is given to psychology’s most accomplished and respected scientists whose research addresses critical societal problems.
Professor Gopnik is a developmental psychologist whose research explores how young children come to know about the world around them. She is the author or co-author of The Philosophical Baby: What Children’s Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love, and the Meaning of Life (Picador, 2010), The Scientist in the Crib: Minds, Brains, And How Children Learn (William Morrow, 1999), and How Babies Think: The Science of Childhood (Orion Publishing, 2001). Dr. Gopnik joined the Berkeley faculty in 1988. She is a graduate of McGill University in Montreal and holds a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Oxford in England.
Dr. Gunnar has spent her career studying how stress biology affects human brain and behavioral development and the processes that help children regulate stress and emotions. She has taught at the Univerity of Minnesota since 1978. Professor Gunnar is a graduate of Mills College in Oakland, California. She earned a Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Stanford University.