Nancy Kanwisher

Nancy Kanwisher is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT, and Investigator at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She received her B.S. in 1980 and her PhD in 1986, both from MIT. After receiving her Ph.D., Kanwisher held a MacArthur Fellowship in Peace and International Security for two years. Kanwisher then served as a faculty member for several years each in the UCLA and Harvard Psychology departments, before returning to MIT in 1997. Kanwisher's lab has contributed to the identification and characterization of a number of regions in the human brain that conduct very specific cognitive functions, including four that are involved in the visual perception of specific kinds of stimuli (faces, places, bodies, and words). Kanwisher received a Troland Research Award from the National Academy of Sciences in 1999, a MacVicar Faculty Fellow teaching Award from MIT in 2002, and the Golden Brain Award from the Minerva Foundation in 2007. She was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009. She has recently launched a web site with short lectures for lay audiences about human cognitive neuroscience: www.nancysbraintalks.mit.edu.