Gregoire Borst is a full Professor of developmental psychology and cognitive neuroscience of education at the University of Paris. He is the director of the Laboratory for the study of Child Development and Education (LaPsyDÉ – CNRS) at La Sorbonne and a junior member of the Institut Universitaire de France since 2017. He obtained his PhD in 2005 at the Université Paris Sud and was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University from 2006 to 2010.
His work focuses on the role of higher-order functions (metacognition, cognitive and emotional control) on the cognitive and socio-emotional development and on the school learnings of children, adolescents, and young adults by combining behavioral, genetic, and neuroimaging methods. Over the last few years, he has developed partnerships to run large-scale online “citizen science” projects with teachers in their classrooms. These studies have provided proof of concept that such an approach allows testing the ecological validity of interventions designed in the lab but also to improve the psychological science literacy of teachers. One of such large-scale “citizen science” projects is ongoing and aims to design and test interventions to help children and adolescents identifying and prevent the spread of “fake news” on social media.
He has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles, seven books, including two to explain the basics of the brain and the mind to children and one to explain the basics of the learning brain to teachers. In 2021, he received the Dagnan-Bouveret Prize of the French Academy of Moral and Political Sciences for his outstanding contribution to Psychology in France.
Gregoire has a strong involvement in advancing developmental psychology in the field of education. He is the co-director of the first CNRS network of labs on developmental psychology and neuroscience for education (over 75 labs and 400+ researchers). He is also the head of a priority research program on education in France from 2021 to 2026.
At the international level, he is a member of two UNESCO panels of the Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education for Peace and Sustainable Development (New Delhi, India) to provide an insight on how findings in developmental psychology contribute to reaching SDG4 – Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education. He is also a Senior Fellow of the International Bureau of Education at UNESCO (Geneva, Switzerland) working on improving the curriculum for teachers based on the latest findings in educational psychology.