Dr. Susan Engel is Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Williams College and the Class of 1959 Founding Director of the Program in Teaching.  Her research interests include the development of narrative, curiosity, and invention. Her current research examines how young children pursue ideas. Her scholarly work has appeared in journals such as Cognitive Development, Developmental Psychology, Harvard Educational Review, and the American Education Research Journal. Her writing on education has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Bloomberg View, The Nation, The Atlantic Monthly, Salon, and The Boston Globe. Her books include: The Hungry Mind: The Origins of Curiosity in Childhood (Harvard University Press 2012), The Children You Teach: Using a Developmental Framework in the Classroom (Heinemann Pubs 2018) and The Intellectual Lives of Children (Harvard University Press 2021). Her newest book, American Kindergarten: Dispatches from the First Year of School, will be published by University of Chicago Press in 2026.

Dr. Matthias Gruber is a Reader and leads the Motivation & Memory Lab at Cardiff University’s Brain Research Imaging Centre (CUBRIC). His work, funded via the Wellcome Trust, the Royal Society and UKRI, focuses on the neural underpinnings of how curiosity influences learning and memory. Dr. Gruber recently led a co-production with science communicators from Science Made Simple and five primary schools in Cardiff, where children aged 7-10 developed their own research projects to explore their curiosity and presented their findings at Techniquest Science Centre, Cardiff. In addition to his research, Dr. Gruber is passionate about science communication. He co-authored a paper written specifically for children to explain the research on curiosity, and his work has been featured widely (e.g., in The Guardian, New Scientist, and Scientific American, BBC Radio 4’s). He also delivered a popular TEDx talk on curiosity-based learning, making curiosity research accessible to broad audiences.

Dr. Wendy Ross is a Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for the BSc in Psychology at London Metropolitan University, where she focuses her research on creative cognition, possibility studies, and serendipity research. With over 50 publications, she has developed theoretical frameworks to allow the detailed analysis of complex phenomena and pioneered cross disciplinary methodologies to investigate the role of the material in human thinking. Dr. Ross is a founding member and co-chair of the Possibility Studies Network, Managing Associate Editor of Possibility Studies and Society, and serves as Honorary Secretary of the BPS Cognitive Psychology section. Her interdisciplinary research spans psychology, philosophy, and anthropology, with particular focus on how humans interact with the unknown in creative processes. Her work has been recognized with awards from the American Psychological Association and has attracted funding from organizations including the British Academy.

In this session, we will discuss what curiosity is, focusing on the ways curiosity has been conceptualized across theoretical frameworks.

In this session, we will discuss how curiosity can be studied, including issues of measurement, disciplinary methods, quantitative and qualitative data, participatory research.

In this session, we will discuss when curiosity comes to expression, highlighting the conditions that elicit curiosity, environmental factors and contexts.

'Harbinger' commissioned by The CoLab, Deco Publique and LICA (2025). An Installation of sculpture, drawing, and response to bird song through human voice, explores our intertwined existence with the birds of the bay, and our use of domestic and commercial pesticides. The installation that will be viewed as a part of the curiosity network's inaugural workshop will be an evolution of this earlier work.