Jonathan Schooler
Professor, University of California at Santa Barbara
Jonathan earned his BA at Hamilton College in 1981 and his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 1987. He joined the psychology faculty of the University of Pittsburgh as an assistant professor that same year and became a research scientist at Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center. Named a full professor in 2001, he moved on to the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2004 as professor of psychology, Canada Research Chair in Social Cognitive Science, and senior investigator at UBC’s Brain Research Centre.
In 2007, he joined the faculty at UCSB. Jonathan pursues research on consciousness, memory, the relationship between language and thought, creativity, problem-solving, and decision-making. He is particularly interested in exploring phenomena that intersect between the empirical and the philosophical such as how fluctuations in people’s awareness of their experience mediate mind-wandering and how exposing individuals to philosophical positions alters their behavior. He is an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium Science Museum in San Francisco, as well as a fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Society for Experimental and Social Psychology. His work has been supported by the National Institute of Mental Health, the Unilever Corporation, the Center for Consciousness Studies, the Office of Educational Research, the Bower Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the John Templeton Foundation, the Imagination Institute, and the Fetzer Franklin Fund.
He currently is on the editorial boards of Consciousness and Cognition, Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Journal of Imagination, Cognition and Personality, and Psychology of Consciousness: Theory Research and Practice. Dr. Schooler is the author or co-author of more than two hundred papers published in scientific journals or edited volumes and was the editor (with J.C. Cohen) of Scientific Approaches to Consciousness, which was published in 1997 by Lawrence Erlbaum.