Urte Laukaityte

Born 1992 in Vilnius/Lithuania.

Urte Laukaityte is a writer and philosopher. Her research interests span a number of disciplines within the broader field of cognitive science, with a primary focus on theoretical psychiatry. As a philosophy PhD candidate at UC Berkeley/USA, she has been developing an empirically-oriented account relevant to phenomena including psychogenic conditions, placebo/nocebo effects, culture-bound syndromes, transient mental illness, mass hysteria and hypnosis. Much of her thinking draws from research within the so-called predictive processing/active inference framework, which has recently produced stimulating new ways of conceptualizing cognition more broadly, and mental illness more specifically. Prior to her PhD program, Laukaityte completed an MSc in cognitive science at the University of Edinburgh/UK, and also holds a BA in linguistics from the University of Cambridge/UK.

Her work has been supported by various foundations and other grant-awarding organizations. Most notably, Laukaityte has been a Global Priorities fellow (within a program run by the Forethought Foundation) as well as a Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, or DISI, fellow (funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation). She is also venturing into the world of general audience writing for publications such as History Today, LARB, Public Domain Review, and others.