Kimberly Noble

Kimberly Noble, MD, PhD, is a neuroscientist and pediatrician, as well as a Professor of Neuroscience and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. She conducts research on the correlation between socioeconomic inequality and children's cognitive and brain development, focusing on how socioeconomic disparities impact cognitive development and variations in brain structure and function throughout infancy, childhood, and adolescence.

Professor Noble is the Director of the Neurocognition, Early Experience, and Development (NEED) Lab and holds substantial research funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) along with more than a dozen private foundations. Furthermore, she holds the position of Principal Investigator for Baby’s First Years, the first clinical trial that explores the link between poverty reduction and cognitive and emotional development in the initial three years of life. The outcomes of this research have garnered attention from media outlets like The New York Times, The Economist, and Bloomberg News.

Noble completed her undergraduate, graduate, and medical degrees at the University of Pennsylvania. She has received prominent recognition for her work, including the American Psychological Association's Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest Award in 2021 and the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions from the Association for Psychological Science in 2017. Notably, she was selected as the John Wiley Distinguished Speaker by the International Society for Developmental Psychobiology in 2020. Noble is also an elected fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and was featured in the American Psychological Association’s #ThankAScientist campaign in 2017. Her work has been published in esteemed journals like Nature Neuroscience and Developmental Science and has notably received over 2 million views on her TED talk, "How does income affect childhood brain development?".