Susan Goldin-Meadow is the Beardsley Ruml Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Comparative Human Development, the college, and the Committee on Education at the University of Chicago.

She is the principal investigator of a 10-year program project grant, funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, designed to explore the impact of environmental and biological variation on language growth.

Before coming to Penn and while an undergraduate at Smith College, she spent a year at the Piagetian Institute in Geneva, where she conducted research with Barbel Inhelder and Hermine Sinclair and took courses with Jean Piaget.

This prize is awarded annually to an individual or collaborative team making a significant contemporary contribution to the theoretical foundations of human cognition.

This interest continues to energize her research,[9] which exploits the gestures that we produce with our hands to explore two fundamental questions.