Lera Boroditsky is a cognitive scientist and professor in the fields of language and cognition. She is currently one of the main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity. Boroditsky was born in Belarus to a Jewish family. When she was 12 years old, her family emigrated to the United States, where she learned to speak English as her fourth language. As a teenager she began thinking about the degree to which language differences could shape an argument and exaggerate the differences between people. She received her B.A. degree in cognitive science at Northwestern University in 1996. She went to graduate school at Stanford University, where she obtained her Ph.D. in cognitive psychology. she also conducted research at Stanford University. She became an assistant professor in the department of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT before she was hired by Stanford in 2004. Boroditsky is currently associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), She studies language and cognition, focusing on interactions between language, cognition, and perception. Her research combines insights and methods from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology.Her work has provided new insights into the controversial question of whether tar, and has received several awards for her research, including an NSF CAREER award, the Marr Prize from the Cognitive Science Society, and the McDonnell Scholar Award.In addition to scholarly work, Boroditsky also gives popular science lectures to the general public. Boroditsky is known for her research relating to cognitive science, how language affects the way we think, and other linguistic related topics. One of her main research topics focuses on how people with different linguistic backgrounds act or have different behaviors when exposed to certain events. On the individual level, Boroditsky is interested in how the languages we speak influence and shape the way we think. She has done studies comparing English to other native speakers of a different language and seeing the differences in the way they think and act given a certain scenario. Another example of her work is how she highlighted the difference in the organization of time and space from English to Mandarin. Since it is possible for the speakers of a language to be taught to think like the speakers of other languages do, without needing to learn any such language. The frequent use of a mental metaphor connects it to the abstract concept and helps the mind to store non-concrete information in the long-term memory Her work has suggested that some conventional and systematic metaphors influence the way people reason about the want to fight back against a crime "beast" by increasing the police force but more likely to want to diagnose and treat a crime "virus" through social reform. The languages we speak shape the way we think. She uses powerful examples of cross-linguistic differences in thought and perception that stem from syntactic or lexical differences between languages. Her papers and lectures have influenced the fields of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics in providing evidence and research against the notion that human cognition is largely universal and independent of language and culture.

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