Rate My Professor Thomas Suddendorf

Thomas Suddendorf is a Professor in the School of Psychology at the University of Queensland, a position he has held since joining the institution in 1999 following postgraduate studies in New Zealand. Born and raised in Germany, he earned a Master's degree from the University of Waikato in 1994, with a thesis entitled "Discovery of the fourth dimension: mental time travel and human evolution," and a Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Auckland in 1998, focusing on "On the ontogeny and phylogeny of the representational mind." He serves as Principal Researcher at the Early Cognitive Development Centre (ECDC) within the School of Psychology and has supervised 17 PhD students to completion between 2005 and 2025, while actively supervising current projects on cognitive development.

Suddendorf's research program investigates the mental capacities of young children and nonhuman animals to address core questions regarding the nature and evolution of the human mind. His work integrates developmental, comparative, and evolutionary psychology, with emphases on mental time travel, episodic foresight, self-recognition, innovation, planning, counterfactual thinking, and consciousness. This research has attracted awards from the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, the Australian Psychological Society, and the American Psychological Association. Suddendorf is the author of critically acclaimed books including The Gap: The Science of What Separates Us from Other Animals (2013), which received reviews in Nature, Science, and the Wall Street Journal and has been translated into several languages, and co-author of The Invention of Tomorrow: A Natural History of Foresight (2022), named a Nature Book Reviews Best Science Pick. Among his most influential papers are "The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans?" (2007, Behavioral and Brain Sciences; cited over 3,100 times), "Mental time travel and the evolution of the human mind" (1997; cited over 2,000 times), and "Mental time travel and the shaping of the human mind" (2009). With more than 22,700 citations on Google Scholar, his scholarship has secured repeated funding from the Australian Research Council, including ongoing Discovery Projects on mapping children's foresight capacities (2025-2028) and related themes, profoundly influencing the fields of cognitive and evolutionary psychology.