Nancy Kanwisher

Nancy Kanwisher FBA (born 1958)[1] is the Ellen Swallow Richards Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition.[2]

Nancy Kanwisher
Born
Woods Hole, Massachusetts
NationalityAmerican
EducationPhD
Alma materMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Known forFusiform face area
AwardsGolden Brain Award
Heineken Prize
Scientific career
FieldsCognitive psychology
InstitutionsUCLA
Harvard University
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ThesisRepetition blindness: type recognition without token individuation (1986)
Doctoral advisorMary C. Potter

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. After obtaining her PhD working with Mary Potter, she then did her post-doctoral work with Anne Treisman at UC-Berkeley. 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.[3]

Kanwisher is a member and associate editor for journals in areas of cognitive science, including Cognition, Current Opinion in Neurobiology, Journal of Neuroscience, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and Cognitive Neuropsychology.[4] She has also written on other subjects, including an article in the Huffington Post and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciencesin 2010 about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.[5]

Kanwisher once 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.[6]

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 Walter A. Rosenblith Professor in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. She was awarded the National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award in 1999, awarded for achievement in investigations regarding relationships of consciousness and the physical world.[4] She received the MacVicar Faculty Fellow Award in 2002[7] and the 2016 National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award.[8]

She serves as a member of the National Academy of Sciences (since 2005), American Academy of Arts and Sciences (since 2009),[9] and received a 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.[10]

Research

Kanwisher has training in cognitive psychology, which is investigating how the mind works by observing its outward behavior. She discovered the "Fusiform face area",[11][12] 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.[4] In her research, she uses functional MRI,[3][13] behavioral methods, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. She also uses ECOG to study audition, language processing, and social perception. She gave a 2014 TED Talk entitled "A Neural Portrait of the Human Mind".[13]

References
  1. Sanders, Laura (April 27, 2015). "Brain on display: Nancy Kanwisher goes where few other neuroscientists dare to in public outreach". Science News. Kanwisher, 56
  2. "Nancy Kanwisher". McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT. Retrieved 13 November 2014.
  3. "Q&A with Prof. Nancy Kanwisher '80 (CPW Preview!) | MIT Admissions". mitadmissions.org. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  4. Landau, Barbara. "Nancy Kanwisher". Cognitive Science Society. Archived from the original on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  5. "Listening to Palestinians". The Huffington Post. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  6. "This Badass Scientist Shaved Off Her Hair To Teach Students About Brain Regions". BuzzFeed. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  7. "Brain and Mind". c250.columbia.edu. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  8. https://commonfund.nih.gov/pioneer/Recipients16
  9. "Eight from MIT elected to AAAS". MIT News. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  10. "Elections to the British Academy celebrate the diversity of UK research". British Academy. 2 July 2017. Retrieved 29 July 2017.
  11. Kanwisher, Nancy (1997-06-01). "The Fusiform Face Area: A Module in Human Extrastriate Cortex Specialized for Face Perception" (PDF). The Journal of Neuroscience. 17 (11): 4302–4311. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.17-11-04302.1997. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
  12. Kanwisher, Nancy (2000). "Response Properties of the Human Fusiform Face Area" (PDF). Cognitive Neuropsychology. 17 (1–3): 257–280. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.208.2920. doi:10.1080/026432900380607. PMID 20945183.
  13. "The brain is a Swiss Army knife: Nancy Kanwisher at TED2014". TED Blog. Retrieved 2015-11-11.
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