Madeleine Gross is an artist and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Madeleine is a leading researcher in the psychology of curiosity, creativity, and personality development. Her work explores how curiosity acts as a catalyst for positive development and human flourishing.
Madeleine bridges neuroscience and applied psychology to design interventions that foster curiosity-driven exploration and character growth. By grounding her research in neurobiological processes, she investigates the mechanisms behind individual differences in temperament and character. Her findings suggest that variations in how the brain prioritizes information may shape differences in attention, motivation, and belief systems, which together contribute to the broader patterns of thought and behavior we recognize as personality.
Madeleine graduated as valedictorian from Cal Poly in 2015 before joining the META (Memory Emotion Thought Awareness) lab, within the Psychological and Brain Sciences department. Since then she has broadly studied the psychological basis of creative idea generation and insight, the physiology of awe and wonder— via the experience of “aesthetic chills”, the phenomenology of thought, artistic engagement, volitional personality change, and intellectual humility.