Susana Martinez-Conde

Susana Martinez-Conde is an award-winning neuroscientist, author, and professor at the State University of New York Downstate Health Sciences University. She is the founder and Executive Director of the annual Best Illusion of the Year Contest, which inspired her most recent book, “Champions of Illusion,” published by Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux. Her first book, the international bestseller “Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions,” was published by Holt and won the Prisma Prize for Best Science Book of the Year. Martinez-Conde is one of the premier science communicators in the United States and has made television appearances on National Geographic Channel’s Redesign My Brain, Discovery Channel’s Head Games, The Daily Planet, PBS’s NOVA:scienceNow, StarTalk, CBS Sunday Morning, and The World According to Jeff Goldblum. She is a columnist on “Illusions” for Scientific American, and additionally writes for publications such as The New York Times, The Sunday Times (London), New Scientist, American Scientist, Mental Floss, and How It Works. Her research and scientific communication activities have been featured in print in the New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, among hundreds of media stories worldwide. She has published over a hundred articles in the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, including Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.