Nancy Kanwisher

Academic Background

Nancy Kanwisher received her BS in Biology from MIT in 1980 and her PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 1986. Before returning to MIT as a faculty member in 1997 in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Kanwisher served as a faculty member at both UCLA and Harvard University.

Nancy is also a member and associate editor for journals in areas of cognitive science, including Cognition, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Journal of Neuroscience, and Cognitive Neuropsychology. Kanwisher has also shown an interest in a variety of academic subjects, publishing an article in the Huffington Post in 2010 about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Showing her quirky personality and enthusiasm for the cognitive sciences, Nancy shaved her head while teaching a lecture on neuroanatomy to point out the functional regions of the brain so her students could visualize the concepts.

Achievements and Awards

Kanwisher has received numerous accolades for her academic endeavors. She founded the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and is now the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. Nancy was also awarded the National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award in 1999, awarded for achievement in investigations regarding relationships of consciousness and the physical world. Kanwisher also received the MacVicar Faculty Fellow Award in 2002 and the 2016 National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award.

She also now serves as a member of the National Academy of Sciences (2005), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009), and the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in Peace and International Security (1986).

In July 2017, Kanwisher was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy (FBA), the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.

Lab Work And Research

Nancy Kanwisher has training in cognitive psychology, which is investigating how the mind works by observing its outward behavior. She discovered the "Fusiform face area", a region of the brain that recognizes fine distinctions between well-known objects (an example of this is facial recognition). She also discovered the "Parahippocampal place area", a region of the brain that recognizes environmental scenes. These two discoveries are now widely discussed in the cognitive field and provide a gold standard for clarity in search for primitives of human cognition. In her research, she uses a brain imaging method called Functional MRI which enables a researcher to watch small parts of the human brain turn on and off as the research subject thinks different thoughts. The MRI allows a fuller understanding of each brain region - what they do, how they do it, how they develop - and can help look for other special parts in the brain. Another area of Kanwisher's research uses behavioral methods and TMS to test the causal role of each brain region in cognition and also uses ECOG to study audition, language processing, and social perception. Nancy Kanwisher's lab work is so extensive that she received the opportunity to give a TED Talk entitled "A Neural Portrait of the Human Mind".