Nicholas Judd is a cognitive neuroscientist and developmental psychologist whose research centres on identifying which environmental conditions shape children’s brain and cognitive development — and on translating that knowledge into policy. Drawing on methods from psychology, neuroscience, economics, and sociology, he uses natural experiments to establish the causal links between modifiable environmental exposures and children’s neural and cognitive outcomes. In addition to his Pro Futura Scientia Fellowship, he holds a Jacobs Foundation Fellowship (2025–2027) for his work on childhood development and an eScience Fellowship (2024–2025) for his contributions to open science.

Early environmental differences have lasting consequences: disparities in brain structure and cognitive ability that emerge in childhood tend to persist — and often widen — across development. Identifying their causes, rather than their correlates, is therefore essential for informing policy. Judd exploits quasi-experimental variation — from pollution events to compulsory schooling reforms to income differences —to isolate environmental effects. His work has shown, for example, how parental income shapes cortical surface area (Judd et al., PNAS, 2020), how schooling raises intelligence (Judd et al., NPJ Science of Learning, 2022), and how increased compulsory schooling reforms do not lead to neural reserve (Judd & Kievit, eLife, 2025). His current research extends this causal framework to wildfire smoke and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) exposure in children, drawing on large-scale longitudinal neuroimaging data from the ABCD Study.

Alongside this environmental programme, Judd conducts fundamental research on the structure and malleability of cognition. His work spans cognitive training — demonstrating that spatial cognitive training enhances mathematical learning in a large, randomized study of 17,000 children (Judd & Klingberg, Nature Human Behaviour, 2021) — and psychometric innovation, developing approaches that separate intraindividual variability from mean performance to isolate distinct components of cognitive function (Judd et al., Journal of Cognition, 2024). He is also an active open-science practitioner: his ggrain R package for raincloud plots has exceeded 57,000 downloads, and he leads the development of the Open Matrices Stimuli Set External link, opens in new window. a freely available resource for cognitive testing.

Judd’s long-term goal is to translate rigorous causal evidence into actionable policy: to identify which environments are developmentally harmful, for whom, and at what points in development — and to ensure that knowledge reaches those who can act on it.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2026-27.