Tali Sharot | |
---|---|
Nationality | Israeli |
Alma mater | New York University |
Occupation | Professor of cognitive neuroscience |
Employer | University College London |
Tali Sharot is an associate professor of cognitive neuroscience in the department of Experimental Psychology at University College London. She received her Ph.D in psychology and neuroscience from New York University. Dr. Sharot is known for her research on the neural basis of emotion, decision making and optimism.
Sharot is especially known for her discovery of the neural underpinnings of human optimism, work that has been published in numerous eminent journals. In her books The Optimism Bias and The Science of Optimism, she describes the evolutionary benefits of unrealistic optimism along with its dangers.Richard Stengel has written in a Time editorial that Sharot’s work gives us a better grip on how we function in reality. The implications of Sharot’s discoveries for health, finance, cyber security, policy and more have been extensively covered by the media and she is often featured on radio, TV and in the written press. Sharot was one of the presenters on the Dara Ó Briain's Science Club, who also introduced her on stage at The Royal Albert Hall's Imagining the future of Medicine in 2014. She was a speaker at TED2012.
Sharot is a Wellcome Trust Fellow, a Fellow of the Forum of European Philosophy and previously a British Academy postdoctoral fellow. Her book The Optimism Bias won the British Psychological Society Book award for 2014. She has been described as "one of the top female scientists in her country" listed as one of the 15 exemplary female Israeli-born scientists alive. Her TED 2012 talk has been viewed over 1.5 million times.