Stephen Kosslyn is a cognitive neuroscientist. He has spent fifty years studying how the mind works, and the last fifteen on the question of how to use what we have learned about the brain to make teaching efficient, effective, and engaging.

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His early research helped resolve empirically one of the longest-running arguments in cognitive science: whether visual mental images are real things in the brain or only a manner of speaking. The answer, developed across a series of books beginning with Image and Mind in 1980 and culminating in The Case for Mental Imagery in 2006, is that they are real, and that the brain produces them using much of the same machinery it uses for vision itself.

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He spent over three decades of his career at Harvard, joining the faculty in 1977. He served as Chair of the Department of Psychology, as Dean of Social Science, and from 2001 as the John Lindsley Professor of Psychology, the chair established in memory of William James. He retired from Harvard in 2011 as Lindsley Professor Emeritus.

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After a brief stint on the faculty at Stanford University and as Director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, in 2013 he became founding Dean and Chief Academic Officer of the Minerva Schools, later Minerva University, a startup university designed from first principles based on the science of learning. He spent five years building its academic program. In 2018 he founded a two-year college, Foundry College, designed to provide working adults with skills and knowledge that would not be easily automated.

 

From 2020 to 2026 he founded and ran Active Learning Sciences, a company that designs AI-driven educational programs for universities, corporations, and governments. His recent books include Active Learning Online (2020), Active Learning with AI (2023), and Learning to Flourish in the Age of AI (2024).

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He has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of Experimental Psychologists, holds honorary doctorates from the Sorbonne, the University of Bern, and the Université de Caen, and was a Guggenheim Fellow in 2004.

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Stephen was born in Santa Monica, took his BA at UCLA and his PhD at Stanford, and lives in New York City. His hobbies include struggling with the French language and electric bass guitar.