Dr Laurie Santos is a professor in the Department of Psychology and the interdisciplinary Cognitive Science Program as well as head of college for Silliman College. She is also director of the Comparative Cognition Laboratory (“CapLab”) and the Canine Cognition Center at Yale. Santos studies the evolutionary origins of both our smarter human capacities and our not-so-smart capacities, such as our irrational economic biases and errors. Her “monkeynomics” studies on the latter topic were featured in a TED talk.
Santos’ course, Psychology and the Good Life, became Yale’s most popular course in over 300 years, with almost one out of four students at Yale enrolled. Her course has been featured in numerous news outlets including the New York Times, NBC Nightly News, The Today Show, GQ Magazine, Slate and O! Magazine.
A winner of numerous awards both for her science and teaching, Santos was recently voted as one of Popular Science Magazine’s “Brilliant 10” young minds and was named in Time Magazine as a “Leading Campus Celebrity. In 2019, Santos became the host of the podcast Happiness Lab, which examines the latest scientific research on factors impacting our well-being and happiness. Happiness Lab is ranked among the top 3 on Apple Podcasts and has accumulated over 100 million downloads since its launch. Santos appeared in the 2018 Netflix documentary The Most Unknown, on scientific research directed by Ian Cheney.
