KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Yuko Munakata is a Professor of Psychology and director of the Cognition in Context Lab in the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis. For over 25 years, Dr. Munakata has studied cognitive development using behavioral studies, computational modeling, and neuroimaging techniques. Her research focuses on executive functions, how they vary across individuals, settings, and development, and why these variations matter for important life outcomes. Her current research focuses on understanding how children adapt in response to their individual experiences in ways that shape unique profiles of delaying gratification, planning, and interest in engaging mental effort. Her work on child development has been funded by the National Institutes of Health since 1998, and has been featured in the popular press, including The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and even The Onion. Her TEDx talk on The science behind how parents affect child development has reached millions of viewers.

 

Dr. Munakata has received awards in recognition of her research, teaching, and mentoring, including the American Psychological Association's Boyd McCandless Award for distinguished contributions to developmental psychology. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the American Psychological Association.

 

Dr. Munakata received a B.A. in Psychology and B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Carnegie Mellon University. After conducting postdoctoral research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was a professor at the University of Denver and then the University of Colorado Boulder before moving to the University of California.