ABIGAIL MARSH

Abigail Marsh is a Professor in the Department of Psychology and the Interdisciplinary Program in Neuroscience at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University and conducted her post-doctoral research at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Her research is aimed at answering the questions: How do we understand what others think and feel? What drives us to help other people? What prevents us from harming them? Her research on these topics uses functional and structural brain imaging, as well as behavioral, cognitive, genetic, and pharmacological techniques, and has received awards that include the Cozzarelli Prize for scientific excellence and originality from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, The S&R Kuno Award for Applied Science for the Social Good, and the Richard J. Wyatt Fellowship award for translational research from the National Institute of Mental Health.

She has authored articles in The New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Scientific American, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Her TED talk has reached over 2.5 million viewers around the world.

Her first book Good for Nothing (UK title), The Fear Factor (US title) examines the poles of human empathy from altruism to psychopathy. It was published in 2017 by Little, Brown in the UK, Basic Books in the US and in seven other languages to critical acclaim.