Susan Wagner Cook is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Iowa. She received her B.S. in 2000 from the University of Chicago, majoring in Mathematics and Psychology, where she then received her PhD in Psychology in 2006, working with Susan Goldin-Meadow. (Her sister, Martha Alibali, also received her PhD. in the Goldin-Meadow Lab, in 1994.) Susan completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester, before moving to Iowa in 2008.

She studies the hand gestures that accompany speech. Although gestures are ubiquitous and robust behaviors, seen in speakers of all ages, of all languages, and from all cultures, it is not at all clear why we gesture when we speak. Work in Susan Wagner Cook’s lab seeks to understand the nature and function of gesture across development. Findings suggest that human thinking emerges from the interaction of abstract, symbolic structures and visible, bodily behavior, and that this interaction draws on simultaneous activation of information across multiple memory systems.