Kimberly Noble, MD, PhD

Kimberly Noble, MD, PhD, is a professor of Neuroscience and Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. As a neuroscientist and board-certified pediatrician, she directs the Neurocognition, Early Experience, and Development (NEED) lab, where she and her team study how socioeconomic inequality relates to children’s cognitive, emotional, and brain development.  Her work examines socioeconomic disparities in cognitive development, as well as brain structure and function across infancy, childhood, and adolescence. She is particularly interested in understanding how early in infancy such disparities develop, the modifiable environmental differences that account for these disparities, and the ways we might harness this research to inform the design of interventions.

Dr. Noble received her undergraduate, graduate, and medical degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, and completed her residency in pediatrics at Columbia University Medical Center. She was awarded the 2017 Association for Psychological Science Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, and the 2021 American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology in the Public Interest. Dr. Noble is an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. Her TED talk has more than 2 million views to date, and her work has received worldwide attention in the popular press.

Dr. Noble has funding from NIH and numerous foundations, and she is one of the principal investigators of Baby’s First Years, the first clinical trial of poverty reduction to assess the causal impact of income on children’s cognitive, emotional, and brain development in the first three years of life.