Mercator Fellow

Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Comparative Human Development, and the Committee on Education, at the University of Chicago. While at Smith College during her undergraduate days, she spent her junior year at the Piagetian Institute in Geneva, which set the course of her academic career. She completed her PhD at the University of Pennsylvania under the direction of Rochel Gelman and Lila Gleitman. Her research focuses on the home-made gestures profoundly deaf children create when not exposed to sign language, and what they tell us about the fundamental properties of mind that shape language; and on the gestures hearing speakers around the globe spontaneously produce when they talk, and what they tell us about how we talk and think. She has been President of the Association for Psychological Sciences, the Cognitive Development Society, the International Society for Gesture Studies, and Chair of the Cognitive Science Society. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.