Gary Marcus is an award-wining Professor of Psychology at New York University and director of the NYU Center for Child Language. He has written three books about the origins and nature of the human mind, including Kluge (2008, Houghton Mifflin/Faber), and The Birth of the Mind (Basic Books, 2004, translated into 6 languages). He is also the editor of The Norton Psychology Reader, and the author of numerous science publications in leading journals, such as Science, Nature, Cognition, and Psychological Science. He is also the editor of the Norton Psychology Reader and has frequently written articles for the general public, in forums such as Wired, Discover, The Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times.

As a teenager, Marcus studied at Hampshire College, a small, experimental liberal arts college that was one of the first places in the country to allow students to concentrate in cognitive science. Marcus received his PhD from MIT, at the age of 23, under the direction of Steven Pinker. He then taught at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1993-1997, and has been a professor at NYU since 1997. He has also been a Fellow at the prestigious Center for Advanced Study in Stanford California, and won the Robert Fantz Award for new investigators in cognitive development. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Human Frontier Science Program.

He has written three books. The first, The Algebraic Mind: Integrating Connectionism and Cognitive Science (MIT Press, 2001) sought to understand the fundamental elements of human cognition, and made proposals about how those elements might be instantiated in the brain. The second,The Birth of the Mind: How A Tiny Number of Genes Creates The Complexity of Human Thought, (Basic Books, 2004) explored the intersection between cognitive development and molecular biology, focusing on the interrelation between genes and environment in the development a newborn’s brain.

His most recent book, Kluge: The Haphazard Evolution of the Human Mind (Houghton-Mifflin, 2008), which was a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice in 2008,  focuses on the limitations of human thought, and how those limits evolved. Seed Magazine described Kluge as “essential for understanding human cognition.”