Amy Cuddy wasn’t supposed to become a successful scientist. In fact, she wasn’t even supposed to finish her undergraduate degree. Early in her college career, Cuddy suffered a severe head injury in a car accident, and doctors said she would struggle to fully regain her mental capacity and finish school.

But she proved them wrong. Today, Cuddy is a professor and researcher at Harvard Business School, where she studies how nonverbal behavior and snap judgments affect people from the classroom to the boardroom, and teaches thousands of students how to channel nonverbal cues into persuasive leadership.

Amy Cuddy’s work on power posing — brief, nonverbal expressions of competence and power — has won praise worldwide. Her 2012 TED talk on the subject, “Your Body Language Shapes Who You Are” has over 16 million views and is one of the top-five most watched on the TED site. The Guardian calls it one of 20 Online Talks That Could Change Your Life.

Cuddy has been named a 2014 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, a “Game Changer” by TIME Magazine, one of the “50 Women Who Are Changing the World” by Business Insider, and a “Rising Star” by the Association for Psychological Science. Her research has been covered on the Today Show, CNN, MSNBC, by the New York Times, Financial Times, Wired, Boston Globe, Forbes, and the Wall Street Journal, among other news outlets.

Cuddy’s groundbreaking research has been published in top academic journals and she has received numerous accolades and academic awards. Her work was featured in Harvard Business Review’s Top 20 Breakthrough Ideas for 2009 (“Just because I’m nice, don’t assume I’m dumb”), Scientific American Mind in 2010 (“Mixed impressions: How we judge others on multiple levels”), and as one of the Top 10 Psychology Studies of 2010 by Psychology Today. She also writes and blogs for Harvard Business Review.

Amy Cuddy holds a PhD in Social Psychology from Princeton University and BA in Psychology from the University of Colorado. Prior to joining HBS, she was an Assistant Professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. At Harvard, Amy teaches MBA, executive education, and doctoral courses on influence & persuasion, leadership, and decision making. She is also a classically trained (and still practicing) ballet dancer, which informs her research on nonverbal communication.