Howard Nusbaum is currently the Director of the Chicago Center for Practical Wisdom and Stella M. Rowley Professor of Psychology at the University of Chicago. He has recently returned from serving as the Division Director for the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences in the Directorate of the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences at the National Science Foundation. His research is on the psychology, neurobiology, and comparative biology of language use, the role of sleep in learning, attention and working memory, and the neurobiology of economic decisions. He is the director of the APEX Lab (Attention, Perception, and EXperience lab) where they study speech perception and music perception as auditory skills, perception as a cognitive system interconnected with other psychological systems, and how wiser decisions arise from experiences supporting an interaction of intellectual virtues such as epistemic humility, reflection, curiosity, and perseverance with moral virtues.

He is a Fellow of the Psychonomic Society and the Association for Psychological Science, and a Faculty Fellow of the Hyde Park Institute, and has served on the Nominating Committee for the Psychonomic Society. He has edited five books on topics ranging from mechanisms of perception to psychophysiology to wise reasoning. He has published over 100 peer reviewed journal articles on perception and perceptual learning, sleep consolidation, absolute pitch, neural mechanisms of speech perception, environmental neuroscience, neuroeconomics, hallucination, and wisdom. He has published over 100 peer reviewed journal articles on perception and perceptual learning, sleep consolidation, absolute pitch, neural mechanisms of speech perception, environmental neuroscience, neuroeconomics, hallucination, and wisdom.