Official Story
Moira R. Dillon, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University. A recipient of the National Science Foundation CAREER Award and the Cognitive Science Society’s Lila R. Gleitman Prize for her work on the cognitive origins of geometry and its implications for both formal and informal learning, Dillon collaborates with economists, educators, and policy makers on game-based curricula for school-readiness in mathematics. Dillon was named a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, which has also recognized her for her work characterizing infant and machine intelligences. Dillon’s research everywhere aims to elucidate the foundations of human cognition and show how it can be harnessed to improve learning across diverse contexts.
Unofficial Story
Moira (Molly) Dillon was born in Philadelphia, PA, and spent her first years just blocks away from the childhood home of Noam Chomsky. She was raised in a nearby suburb and attended a large public high-school, where she was co-captain of the Varsity Women’s Basketball team and finished first in her class.
Despite her love of sports, Molly’s love for math and science is what led her to Yale, where she decided that the best way to support that love was to surround it with intense training in the humanities. After completing Yale’s year-long great-books program, Molly decided to major in cognitive science — the most spectacularly interdisciplinary field there is! And because Molly loved making art too, she added a fine arts major, first pursuing painting then animation. At Yale, Molly met her partner, Brian, a humanist and medievalist, who got his doctoral degree at Yale in its storied French Department.
After graduation, Molly almost took a job as a video game designer in the Silicon Valley but decided that she was more interested in asking why a good design is compelling rather than in being a designer herself. After three different full-time jobs as a research assistant, investigating the mind and brain at various levels of analysis (systems neuroscience, cognitive neuroimaging, developmental cognitive science), Molly found that developmental cognitive science was right for her, and she secured a spot in the doctoral program in developmental psychology at Harvard. This success, however, did not come without failed prior attempts, including both rejections and a tough decision to turn down a program in vision science the previous year that just wasn’t for her.
After taking out a personal loan to fund her move to Cambridge, Molly’s sports training finally came in handy: She secured secondary employment during graduate school teaching fitness classes at the Harvard gyms (remember Zumba?!). In her second year, Molly was offered the opportunity to take her basic research out of the lab and into the real and complex environments in which learning actually happens by designing and implementing a game-based math intervention in impoverished areas of India. This opportunity forever changed how Molly conceptualized and conducted her science. After an intense couple of years in graduate school, Molly embarked for three months to France to conduct studies with French collaborators. Committed to learning French, Molly avoided her anglophone colleagues at lunch and eventually ran families in her experiments in French. Following an unsuccessful soft-launch on the job market in her fifth year, Molly soft-launched again in her sixth year, and, because timing is everything and with a stroke of luck as well, she secured the very NYU job that she had been rejected from the year prior.
Since 2017, Molly has been an Assistant Professor of Psychology at NYU, a span of eight years during which there was a global pandemic that redefined the landscape of developmental science. This time also included her diagnosis of Celiac Disease, an autoimmune disease that explained the symptoms she had been experiencing since college and required a new strict — and at times socially isolating — regimen to treat. In 2020 and again in 2023, Molly gave birth to her two magnificent children, Seán and Réalta. Molly’s successes so far as a parent on the tenure track are thanks to the support of her partner Brian and the joy her children bring to her daily life.
As a second-generation American from a rising working-class family who values education, Molly is grateful for the opportunities she has been given and is proud to be in a position to bring such opportunities to others.