Douglas L. Medin

Douglas Medin is the Louis W. Menk Professor of Psychology and holds a joint appointment in Education and Social Policy at Northwestern University. He is also Director of the Program in Culture, Language, and Cognition; and Program in Cognitive Studies of the Environment at Northwestern University. Member, National Academy of Sciences. Medin's research has led to a deeper understanding of categorization and category-based reasoning, and how it relates to learning and memory. He was among the first to develop quantitative models of human categorization, models which have had an enormous impact on several fields of psychology as well as other disciplines. His current research examines culture, cognition, and learning; computational models of cognition, concept, and classification learning; and decision making. Recently he served on the National Research Council committee on Informal Science Learning. He is a recipient of an APA Presidential Citation and the APA Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award. In 2011-2012 he is serving as president of the Association for Psychological Science.