Sharon Thompson-Schill

In 2021, Thompson-Schill was named Philadelphia's Biggest Foodie by the Delicious City podcast.

Dr. Sharon Thompson-Schill is the Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is an expert on the biological basis of human cognitive systems, including language, memory, perception, and cognitive control, and the relationships between these systems. As of 2019, she has produced more than 150 scientific publications, which collectively have been cited over 13,700 times.

Thompson-Schill is active in positions of leadership both at the University of Pennsylvania and in the broader scientific community. At the University of Pennsylvania, she recently served as the Chairperson of the Psychology Department (2014-2019), as the founding Director of MindCORE (2017-2019), and as the Director (2010-2014) and Co-Director (2014-2017) of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. She is also a member of the Committee on Science and the Arts at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and has served on the editorial boards of several scientific journals, including as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Cognitive Neuroscience.

Thompson-Schill's career is ongoing and well recognized. She was the Chairwoman of the Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania from 2014 to 2019 and has served as the Director and Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the same university. She also served as the founding Director of MindCORE, the University of Pennsylvania's hub for the integrative study of the mind. She is a well-recognized professor at the university and has held numerous faculty appointments both there and at other institutions (such as Swarthmore College and Notre Dame of Maryland University). She is also a highly sought speaker, giving multiple keynote talks at scientific meetings and regular public presentations. She directs the Thompson-Schill Lab at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is active in research with her team.

Across her career, Thompson-Schill has also been awarded substantial funding for her research program, including continuous support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) since 2000. As of 2019, three major grants are currently active and twenty-five are concluded.

Thompson-Schill has been recognized with numerous awards and honors, both for her innovations in research and for her outstanding mentorship and teaching of students. Her research awards include a Young Investigator Award from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, a Mid-Career Award from the Psychonomic Society, election as a Fellow of the Society of Experimental Psychologists, and election as a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society. Her teaching and mentoring awards include the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education Award from the National Science Foundation (1999), the Women in Cognitive Science Mentorship Award (2004), the Lindback Award for Distinguished Teaching (2006), the Biological Basis of Behavior Society’s Professor of the Year Award (2008), the Trustees’ Council of Penn Women Award for Advising (2016), and the Provost’s Award for Distinguished Ph.D. Teaching and Mentoring (2018).

Thompson-Schill enrolled in Davidson College in 1987 and graduated in 1991 with a B.A. (with honors) in Psychology. She then pursued graduate study at Stanford University in Cognitive Psychology, receiving her Ph.D. in 1996. Her dissertation, entitled "Context effects on word recognition: Implications for models of lexical representation", was published and is currently available in the Stanford University Library. She spent the next three years as a post-doctoral fellow in the Psychology Department at the University of Pennsylvania before joining the faculty there in 1999.

Thompson-Schill was born on June 24, 1970, in Washington D.C. She attended Stone Ridge School of the Sacred Heart in Maryland for high school, graduating in 1987. She currently lives in Philadelphia and has three children, who attended Central High School (Philadelphia) and Julia R. Masterman School (also in Philadelphia), and two of whom have attended Reed College, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Brandeis University, and Emerson College.