Kanwisher’s group have identified brain regions that are engaged in particular functions. Collectively these areas can be thought of as the beginnings of a neural portrait of the human mind. This new neural portrait lays bare a vast landscape of new questions that her group is tackling now. What other mental functions get their own private patch of real estate in the human brain? What information is representation in each region, and what computations does it conduct? What is the causal role of each region in perception and cognition? What other brain regions is each functionally distinctive region structurally connected to, and what functional interactions between regions do those connections afford? How does all this systematic neural structure arise in development? How did it arise over evolution? Why do we have specialized brain regions in the first place? For more information on these topics, you can browse the short videos for laypeople at
NancysBrainTalks, or recent scientific publications from her group (see below).
Nancy Kanwisher is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a founding member of the McGovern Institute. She joined the MIT faculty in 1997, and prior to that served on the faculty at UCLA and Harvard University. In 1999, she received the National Academy of Sciences Troland Research Award.
Member, National Academy of Sciences
Member, American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Corresponding Fellow, British Academy
Fellow, Cognitive Science Society
Member, Society of Experimental Psychologists
George A. Miller Prize in Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience Society, 2020
VSS Davida Teller Award, 2018
Heineken Prize, 2018
Davida Teller Award, 2018
NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, 2016
Distinguished Woman in Science Award, Yale, 2016
Golden Brain Award, Minerva Foundation, 2007
MacVicar Faculty Fellow, 2002
Troland Research Award, 1999