G. Gabrielle Starr

G. Gabrielle Starr is a member of the NewHold Investment Corp. II advisory board. She is an American literary scholar, neuroscientist, and the 10th president of Pomona College in Claremont, California. She is known for her work on 18th-century British literature and in neuroaesthetics, where she employs neuroimaging and machine learning techniques to explore affective and cognitive dimensions of responses to artwork and natural objects. A graduate of Emory and Harvard universities, she has also studied at St Andrews University and the California Institute of Technology. Her work, Feeling Beauty: The Neuroscience of Aesthetic Experience (MIT Press, 2013), was shortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa in 2014. She has published articles in journals including Modern Philology, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Cognition, Neuron, NeuroImage, and Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts. Her latest book, Just in Time: Neuroscience and the Temporality of Aesthetic Life, will be published by MIT Press.  

She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a New Directions Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation. From 2000 to 2017, she was on the faculty at New York University. Starr was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2020 and serves on the boards of private organizations for the arts, education, creativity, and medicine.