Nicholas Rule is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and Canada Research Chair in Social Perception and Cognition. He completed his doctoral training in 2010 at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts, under the mentorship of Nalini Ambady. Prior to that, he did his undergraduate studies at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, where he worked with Neil Macrae.

He has been the recipient of a number of awards, including a Canada Research Chair-Tier II award, the Sage Young Scholar Award, and early career awards from the International Social Cognition Network, International Academy for Intercultural Research, and government of Ontario, Canada. His research broadly covers the areas of social perception and social cognition, specifically person perception, person construal, and social categorization. He utilizes a diverse variety of tools and methods in his research, ranging from micro-level studies of brain function with fMRI to large cross-cultural comparisons across nations. Some of his specific research foci have been the study of perceptually ambiguous groups (social groups whose markers are not visually or perceptually obvious; e.g., sexual orientation, religious ideology, political affiliation), predicting outcomes based on appearance and nonverbal cues (particularly those manifest in the face), and cross-cultural differences in perception, cognition, and social behavior.