Michael Nussbaum, Ph.D. (Stanford, 1997), is a professor of educational psychology at UNLV and the founding director of its Learning Sciences doctoral program. For more than 30 years, his research has focused on argumentation in education, with particular emphasis on science and social studies contexts. Nussbaum has published extensively on argumentation in leading journals, including the Journal of Educational Psychology and Journal of the Learning Sciences. His work examines the relationship between argumentation and conceptual development, the cognitive processes underlying the transfer of argumentation skills, and how to teach students to ask critical questions about arguments.

He is the author of The Waning of Wisdom: The Psychology of Reasoning in the Post-Truth Era (Cambridge University Press, 2026). He also has expertise in statistical analysis and is the author of Categorical & Nonparametric Data Analysis: Choosing the Best Statistical Technique (2nd ed., Routledge, 2024).
Nussbaum served as president of the Educational Psychology Division of the American Psychological Association from 2017 to 2018.