PEN DLS Series: Dr. Nancy Kanwisher

"Functional Imaging of the Human Brain: A Window into the Architecture of the Human Mind"

Dr. Nancy Kanwisher
Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Kanwisher is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT and an Investigator at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She received her B.S. in 1980 and her Ph.D. in 1986, both from MIT. After receiving her Ph.D., Dr. Kanwisher held a MacArthur Fellowship in Peace and International Security for two years. She then served as a faculty member for several years in the UCLA and Harvard Psychology departments before returning to MIT in 1997. Kanwisher's lab has contributed to identifying and characterizing several 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). Dr. 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.