Michael Frank

Michael C. Frank is David and Lucile Packard Professor of Human Biology at Stanford University and Director of the Symbolic Systems Program. He received his PhD from MIT in Brain and Cognitive Sciences in 2010. He studies language use and language learning, and how these interact with social cognition, focusing especially on early childhood. He is the founder of the ManyBabies Consortium, a collaborative replication network for infancy research, and has led open-data projects including Wordbank and MetaLab. He has received the Troland Award of the National Academy of Sciences (2020), the FABBS Early Career Impact Award (2017), the Jacobs Foundation Advanced Research Fellowship (2016), and the Glushko Dissertation Prize from the Cognitive Science Society (2010). He served as Chair of the Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society (2019), was a founding Executive Committee member of the Society for the Improvement of Psychological Science, and has edited for journals including Cognition, Infant Behavior and Development, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.