Karen Wynn

As of 2019, Karen Wynn is a professor emerita at Yale, making a mid-career pivot transitioning from scientist to artist. She has had the great fortune to have an amazing scientific career investigating things that have fascinated her for decades. What she has loved the most about being a scientist and professor is teaching and mentoring undergraduate, graduate, and postdoc students, and, most of all, learning from them. She is excited now to explore the world of art, a fascinating realm that calls on different skills, alternative approaches to knowing, and experiencing the world, and a very different way of thinking about, understanding, and communicating deep truths. 

Professor Wynn joined the Department of Psychology at Yale University in 1999. She grew up in Canada (Saskatchewan), receiving her B.A. in psychology from McGill University and her Ph.D. in cognitive science from MIT. Before coming to Yale, she was a faculty member at the University of Arizona, where she first set up her BabyLab and tested her very first infant.

She has received awards for her research contributions, including the National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award, the American Psychological Association’s Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology, a James McKeen Cattell Foundation Award, and others. She is a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She continues to teach classes on early cognition, on the development of morality and bigotry, and on the mental lives of infants and animals, has done research on these topics, and remains deeply interested in them.