Alexander Todorov was born and grew up in communist Bulgaria. He was in his first college year at Sofia University when the communist system collapsed. In 1995, he studied for a year at Oxford University, the UK, and in 1996, he moved to the United States. Todorov completed a master degree at the New School for Social Research, New York City, in 1998 and a PhD degree at New York University in 2002. Since 2002, he has been a faculty member of Princeton University. Currently, Todorov is professor and associate chair of the department of psychology, an associated faculty member of the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and an affiliated faculty member of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He was a visiting scholar at the Russell Sage Foundation in New York City, at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Bologna, Italy, and a visiting professor at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands. Todorov is a recipient of the SAGE Young Scholar Award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology and of Guggenheim Fellowship. His main focus of research is on how we perceive, evaluate, and make sense of the social world. His research has been published in many journals, including Science, Nature Human Behavior, and PNAS, and covered by media around the world, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, the Times, the New Yorker, BBC, PBS, and NPR.