Dartmouth President, Cognitive Scientist

Sian Leah Beilock has spent her career studying why practiced skill so often deserts people at the moment they need it most. The work earned her the 2017 Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences and has taken her from the laboratory to the boardrooms of Fortune 500 companies and the locker rooms of professional sports teams. 

President Beilock has been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Sciences and Letters, and has written 120 peer-reviewed papers and two books, Choke and How the Body Knows Its Mind, translated into more than a dozen languages. Her TED talk on performing under pressure has been viewed nearly 3 million times. Before Dartmouth, she was the eighth president of Barnard College.

That same question—what allows people to think clearly under pressure—now informs how she leads the institution that gave artificial intelligence its name. Beilock has argued in The Atlantic and elsewhere that AI is not a substitute for education but a test of it: as machines render answers effortless, the work that matters is teaching people to reason soundly and to remain accountable for the decisions they reach with or without machines.