Yuko Munakata

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 child development using behavioral studies, computational modeling, and brain imaging techniques. Her research has been featured in The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Parents Magazine, and even The Onion. Her TEDx talk on The science behind how parents affect child development has reached millions of viewers. 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.