Leor Zmigrod
““I am passionate about science writing that seeks to illuminate both the natural world (including our minds and bodies) and our understanding of politics, history, and philosophy.””
© Ryan BurnellDr Leor Zmigrod is a prize-winning scientist whose research has pioneered the new field of ‘political neuroscience’. She completed her BA and PhD at Cambridge University as a Gates Scholar and won a prestigious Junior Research Fellowship at Churchill College, Cambridge to develop an independent research program into the cognitive roots of ideological convictions.
Dr Zmigrod has held visiting fellowships at Stanford University, Harvard University, the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, and at the Paris Institute of Advanced Study as the Gretty Mirdal Junior Chair in ‘Brain, Culture, and Society’. She was listed on Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science and won the United Kingdom’s Women of the Future Science Award. Dr Zmigrod also received the Cognitive Science Glushko Prize, the 2020 ESCAN Young Investigator Award by the European Society for Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, a Distinguished Junior Scholar Award by the American Political Science Association, and the Emerging Leader Award by the global Women in Cognitive Science. In 2022 she was named the Gold Winner ‘Unifier of the Year’ by MHP’s #30ToWatchPolitics for the impact of her scientific research on bringing communities together in British politics.
Her book, The Ideological Brain, is forthcoming in 2025 from Viking (Penguin Random House) in the UK, Holt (Macmillan) in the US, and in over 10 translated editions, including from Flammarion in France, Suhrkamp in Germany, and Rizzoli in Italy.
Published works
