Alison Gopnik received her BA from McGill University and her PhD. from Oxford University. She was a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada University Research Fellow at the University of Toronto from 1983-1988 and in 1988 became a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley. She is an internationally recognized leader in the study of children's learning and the author of over 100 articles and two books, WORDS, THOUGHTS AND THEORIES (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff), MIT Press, 1997 and THE SCIENTIST IN THE CRIB (coauthored with Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl) William Morrow, 1999. and THE SCIENTIST IN THE CRIB was enthusiastically reviewed in US News and World Report, Time, Science, The New Yorker, the Washington Post and The New York Review of Books (among others). She has also written for The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books and the New York Times.

She has been President of the Society for Philosophy of Psychology, Associate Editor of Child Development, the leading journal in the field and an Osher Fellow at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. She lives in Berkeley, California with her husband and three sons.