Laura Novick is an Associate Professor at Vanderbilt University in the Department of Psychology & Human Development and a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science. She has published 39 articles in peer-reviewed journals and 10 book chapters. She co-authored Discipline-Based Education Research: Understanding and Improving Learning in Undergraduate Science and Engineering, which resulted from her participation on the NRC Consensus Committee on the Status, Contributions, and Future Directions of Discipline-Based Education Research. She is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition and is on the advisory board for an NSF-funded engineering and robotics education project. She has previously investigated basic research issues in areas such as analogical problem solving, expertise, and diagrammatic reasoning. Her current research is exploring issues at the interface of cognitive psychology and biology education. This research is already having an impact on how tree-of-life diagrams are depicted in biology textbooks.