Susana Martinez-Conde received a BS in Experimental Psychology from Universidad Complutense de Madrid and a PhD in Medicine and Surgery from the Universidade de Santiago de Compostela in Spain. She was a postdoctoral fellow with the Nobel Laureate Prof. David Hubel and then an Instructor in Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. Dr. Martinez-Conde led her first laboratory at University College London, and is currently the Director of the Laboratory of Visual Neuroscience at the Barrow Neurological Institute in
Phoenix. Dr. Martinez-Conde has published her academic contributions in Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, and written dozens of popular science articles for Scientific American publications. She has a regular column in Scientific American: MIND, the world’s premier lay magazine of mind and brain, on the neuroscience of illusions. Dr. Martinez-Conde has collaborated in research and outreach projects with many world-renowned magicians and is a member of the prestigious Magic Castle in Hollywood and the Magic Circle in London.
She is the Executive Producer of the annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest (http://illusionoftheyear.com), and has worked with numerous international science museums, foundations and nonprofit organizations to promote neuroscience education. Her international bestselling book Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions has been published in 19 languages, distributed worldwide, and listed as one of the 36 Best Books of 2011 by The Evening Standard, London. Dr. Martinez-Conde has been featured in print in the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, The LA Chronicle, Quo, El Pais, The Times (London), The Chicago Tribune, The Boston Globe, Der Spiegel, among hundreds of media stories all around the globe. She is among the premier science communicators in the United States and has appeared in dozens of television and radio appearances around the world, including Discovery Channel’s Head Games and Daily Planet shows, NOVA:scienceNow, CBS Sunday Morning NPR’s Science Friday, and PRI’s The World.
