Nancy Kanwisher is a pioneering cognitive neuroscientist who has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of the human brain's functional organization. She currently serves as the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is an investigator at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research. Kanwisher earned both her undergraduate degree in biology and her doctoral degree in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT, completing her PhD in 1986. Following her doctoral work with Mary C. Potter, she conducted postdoctoral research with Anne Treisman at UC-Berkeley before establishing independent faculty positions at UCLA and Harvard University, where she served as an Assistant Professor of Psychology from 1994 to 1997 before joining the MIT faculty.
Kanwisher revolutionized cognitive neuroscience through her discovery and characterization of highly specialized brain regions dedicated to specific cognitive functions, beginning with her landmark 1997 identification of the fusiform face area responsible for facial recognition. Her laboratory subsequently identified additional specialized regions including the parahippocampal place area for scene recognition, the extrastriate body area for body perception, and the visual word form area for reading, establishing the principle of functional specialization in the human cortex. These discoveries demonstrated that the human brain contains innate domain-specific systems for processing evolutionarily significant stimuli, fundamentally changing theoretical debates about how cognition is organized in the brain. Her work has generated thousands of citations and has been instrumental in developing the field of functional neuroanatomy that connects cognitive functions to specific neural substrates.
Dr. Kanwisher's contributions have been recognized with numerous prestigious awards including the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, which she received in 2024 for her discovery of the specialized face processing system in the brain. She has been elected to both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served as associate editor for leading journals including the Journal of Neuroscience and Trends in Cognitive Sciences. Beyond her research, she has been a dedicated educator, receiving MIT's MacVicar Faculty Fellow teaching award in 2002, and has influenced generations of cognitive neuroscientists through her mentorship and leadership. Currently, Kanwisher continues to advance our understanding of brain organization through cutting-edge research at the McGovern Institute, exploring the computational principles underlying human cognition and perception.
