Michal Fux
Dr. Michal Fux is a research scientist in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her career has been marked by an unusual intellectual trajectory that links biology, animal behavior, cognitive science, and cultural studies.
She began her academic studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, earning a degree in biology. From there she moved to Tel Aviv University for her master’s degree in zoology, where she developed expertise in careful behavioral observation and experimental approaches to the study of animals. This early grounding in zoology prepared her for the broader comparative perspective that would define her later work.
Dr. Fux pursued her doctoral research at Queen’s University Belfast, in the Institute of Cognition and Culture. Her dissertation explored cultural rituals as by-products of precautionary cognitive systems. The project combined evolutionary reasoning with cultural analysis, proposing that rituals — often viewed as symbolic or arbitrary — can be understood as rooted in the human mind’s ancient strategies for dealing with uncertainty, danger, and threat. Her research at Queen’s was recognized with competitive fellowships and travel awards, and she expanded her perspective further through time as a visiting fellow at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in South Africa.
Following the completion of her Ph.D., she continued her research as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of South Africa, and later moved to the United States to join Northeastern University. At Northeastern’s CORE Lab she worked on projects that examined cognition in cultural and educational contexts, contributing to both experimental research and the mentoring of students.
In 2022, Dr. Fux joined MIT as a research scientist. Her current work connects directly back to the themes that have long animated her scholarship: how cognition drives behavior, whether in humans performing rituals or in animals hunting prey. Her studies of barn owls, for example, have investigated how these birds track their targets and decide when to strike, offering insights into how perceptual systems support survival behaviors. Alongside this, she continues to examine ritual in human life as a window into precaution, memory, and the architecture of the mind.
Dr. Fux’s career, spanning Israel, the United Kingdom, South Africa, and the United States, reflects a consistent effort to cross boundaries between disciplines and institutions. At MIT, she continues to bring together biology, anthropology, and cognitive science to illuminate both the shared patterns and the distinctive complexities of behavior across species