Michelle Trudeau
Michelle Trudeau began her radio career in 1981, filing stories for NPR from Beijing and Shanghai, China, where she and her husband lived for two years. She began working as a science reporter and producer for NPR's Science Desk since 1982. Trudeau's news reports and feature stories, which cover the areas of human behavior, child development, the brain sciences, and mental health, air on NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
Trudeau has been the recipient of more than twenty media broadcasting awards for her radio reporting, from such professional organizations as the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Casey Journalism Center, the American Psychiatric Association, World Hunger, the Los Angeles Press Club, the American Psychological Association, and the National Mental Health Association.
Trudeau is a graduate of Stanford University. While at Stanford, she studied primate behavior and conducted field research with Dr. Jane Goodall at the Gombe Stream Research Centre in Tanzania. Prior to coming to NPR, Trudeau worked as a Research Associate at the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, in Washington, D.C.
Trudeau now lives in Southern California, the mother of twins.
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Bears do it, bats do it. So do dogs and humans. They all yawn. It's a common behavior, but why is a bit of a mystery. Researchers think yawning may perk up the brain and help with social bonding. -
Angela Stimpson donated a kidney to a complete stranger. Why did she do it? Researchers found that the brains of Stimpson and other altruists are sensitive to fear and distress in a stranger's face. -
When researchers asked young children to figure out an experiment using cause and effect, they did a much better job than young adults. That may be because their thinking is more flexible and fluid. -
It's easy to think that a shaking hand could be a sign of Parkinson's disease. But it's more likely essential tremor, an ailment that's not life-threatening but can become debilitating. -
Sleepwalking is common among children, and for many, it persists into adulthood. Though it's still not well understood, scientists have identified several factors that can trigger episodes of sleepwalking. -
People with extraordinary autobiographical memories also tend to have obsessive tendencies, researchers are learning. Brain scans reveal structural differences in the brains of these people, including a larger-than-normal caudate, a brain area linked to OCD. -
A new study in the journal Child Development shows that if you teach students that their intelligence isn't fixed — that it can grow and increase — they do better in school.
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A high-tech machine that monitors infants' brain cells as they listen to speech reveals a key element in how babies go from hearing sounds to speaking them.
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Neurobiologist James McGaugh, one of the world's experts on human memory, says that a woman he calls AJ has a one-of-a-kind memory. In an interview with NPR, she talks about what life is like for someone who can remember things she’s done and news events from almost every day of her life for the past 25 years. Her life is like a split-screen movie, with the past running almost as vividly as the present.
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Neurobiologist James McGaugh is one of the world's leading experts on how human memory works. In the current issue of the journal Neurocase, McGaugh reports on a woman with the astonishing ability to clearly remember events that happened to her decades ago.
