Howard Nusbaum is a University of Chicago Professor and Chair of its Psychology Department, and he is a Co-director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience. Dr. Nusbaum's research focuses on basic mechanisms that mediate social interaction through communication and thinking from an interdisciplinary perspective. His research combines a wide range of methods from different disciplines including behavioral research methods of experimental psychology and developmental psychology, computational modeling, analytic methods of linguistics, and neuroscience methods such as functional neuroimaging.

He has worked with graduate trainees who received PhDs in Psychology, Linguistics, and Music, and who now teach in these fields of study. Trainees in Nusbaum's lab have learned how to design and implement computer-controlled experiments, digital speech and signal processing, psychophysics, phonological and lexical analysis, computational modeling, mathematical modeling, advanced statistics and data analysis, and neuroimaging methods.

Dr. Nusbaum's past research has investigated the effects of sleep on learning, adaptive thinking in children, adaptive processes in language learning, and the neural mechanisms of speech communication. His current research is investigating how social biases influence thinking, the interaction of emotion with thought processes, and how adaptive processing can aid in stroke recovery.