Professor Michael Ranney joined University of California, Berkeley after a post-doctoral fellowship at Princeton’s Cognitive Science Laboratory, following a PhD and MS in experimental cognitive psychology and undergraduate majors in microbiology and psychology. Ranney researches people’s relative explanatory coherence/understanding and fosters the public’s incorporation of challenging information––lately about global climate change.  He designs curricula, methods and software to improve thinking and offers simple, potent public-policy-relevant representations (e.g., see HowGlobalWarmingWorks.org). 

At Berkeley, he heads his Reasoning Research Group, is past chair of SESAME (the Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics Education) and is a member of many faculties, including: Education, Psychology, IPSR (Institute of Personality and Social Research), and Cognitive Science (e.g., ICBS).