Cristine Legare is a professor of psychology, a faculty affiliate of the Population Research Center (PRC), and the founder and director of the Center for Applied Cognitive Science (CACS) at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research examines how the human mind enables us to learn, create, and transmit culture. She conducts comparisons across age, culture, and species to address fundamental questions about the co-evolution of cognition and culture. Cristine’s core areas of expertise include global public health, international education, child development, and cognitive science.

Her research and training reflect her commitment to building a globally representative and inclusive cognitive science discipline. She conducts interdisciplinary research, drawing on insights from cognitive, cultural, developmental, educational, and evolutionary psychology as well as cognitive and evolutionary anthropology and philosophy, with the aim of facilitating cross-fertilization within and across these disciplines. As an undergraduate, she took coursework from a variety of social science disciplines, double majoring in human development and cultural studies at the University of California, San Diego. In graduate school, she participated in the Culture and Cognition Program while completing her doctorate in developmental psychology at the University of Michigan. In addition to directing CACS, she also directs the Evolution, Variation, and Ontogeny of Learning Lab (EVO Learn Lab) at UT Austin. The EVO Learn Lab studies the interplay of our universal mind and the variation of human culture.

Cristine's research has been widely published in a number of high-impact journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Nature Human Behavior, Psychological Science, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and Pediatrics and has been covered by a range of media outlets, including NPR, Nature, The Wall Street Journal, and Scientific American. Her research has received funding from the Economic and Social Research Council (UK), the National Science Foundation, the McDonnell Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the Templeton Religion Trust, the Templeton World Charity Foundation, and the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center (NESCent). Cristine was recognized with the 2015 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions and the 2016 APA Boyd McCandless Award for her research on the evolution and ontogeny of cognition and culture.