Yulia Kovas

Kovas has received external grant funding from NIH; MRC; British Academy, Royal Society, Beijing Normal University; Russian Federal Grants; Erasmus+ mobility. In 2011, she was awarded the ‘Mega Grant for Leading International Scientists’ (£3,000,000) in Russia to establish the Laboratory for Cognitive Investigations and Behavioural Genetics at Tomsk State University (TSU) and to lead a program of interdisciplinary cross-cultural research into individual differences in cognition and learning.

Kovas received her Ph.D. in 2007 from the SGDP Centre, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London. Her thesis on Generalist Genes and Mathematics explored the origins of the individual differences in school mathematics. She received a degree in Literature and Linguistics as well as teaching qualifications from the State Pedagogical University of St Petersburg, Russia in 1996 and taught children of all ages for 6 years. She received a B.Sc in Psychology from Birkbeck College, University of London in 2003 and an MSc in Social, Genetic, and Developmental Psychiatry from the SGDP Centre, King’s College.

Yulia Kovas (born March 12, 1973) is a geneticist and psychologist - currently a Professor of Genetics and Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a visiting professor at UCL, King’s College, Sussex and New York Universities - in the United Kingdom. She received the British Academy Wiley Prize in Psychology in 2012. Kovas is the director of InLab (International Laboratory for Interdisciplinary Investigations into Individual Differences in Learning) at Goldsmiths. She leads the genetically-informative research into individual differences in mathematical ability and achievement as part of the Twins Early Development Study (TEDS) at King’s College, London.