Nikolay Kukushkin

Dr.Nikolay Kukushkin is a Russian-born neuroscientist based in Brooklyn, NY, and is the author of the widely acclaimed One Hand Clapping:How inanimate nature created the human mind, originally published in Russian in 2020. The book won the most prestigious book prize for Russian nonfiction, the Enlightener (Prosvetitel) Award, as well as the Alexander Belyaev Medal, awarded to the best Russian-language nonfiction and science fiction.

Dr. Kukushkin is a clinical assistant professor at New York University’s Liberal Studies, and a research fellow at NYU’s Center for Neural Science, where he studies the molecular, cellular, and evolutionary foundations of memory formation. This book is loosely based on his acclaimed course at NYU, “Life Science.” He holds degrees from St. Petersburg State University (Russia) and Oxford University, and received post-doctoral training at the Department of Cell Biology at Harvard Medical School. He has authored and co-authored multiple publications in prestigious scientific journals including Neuron, PNAS, and Nature Medicine.

Prior to leaving Russia he had spent much of his life facing political turmoil, from the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 when he was 3 years old, to the poverty and instability of 1990s, to the rise of authoritarianism in the 2000s and 2010s, which culminated in the ongoing invasion of Ukraine in 2022.