Laura Simone Lewis

Laura Simone Lewis is an Assistant Professor (starting 2025) in Psychological and Brain Sciences and Anthropology at UC Santa Barbara. She currently holds a UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship at UC Berkeley. Lewis earned her PhD in Human Evolutionary Biology from Harvard University and BS from Duke University.

Her research examines social cognition in humans and great apes using eye-tracking and behavioral methods, focusing on social memory, attention, and theory of mind. Publications explore primate cognition, memory, and social learning. Awards include NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and Harvard Frederick Sheldon Traveling Fellowship.

Lewis mentors doctoral and undergraduate students and leads research on primate social cognition at multiple international institutions, including the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.