1. Nancy Gail Kanwisher FBA was born on 1958 and is the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a researcher at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research.
Nancy Kanwisher received her BS in biology from MIT in 1980 and her PhD in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 1986.
Nancy 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.
Nancy Kanwisher has written on other subjects, including an article in the Huffington Post and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2010 about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Nancy 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.
Nancy Kanwisher 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.
Nancy Kanwisher received the MacVicar Faculty Fellow Award in 2002 and the 2016 National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award.
In 2024, Nancy Kanwisher was one of three recipients of the Kavli Prize in neuroscience "for the discovery of a highly localized and specialized system for representation of faces in human and non-human primate neocortex".
Nancy Kanwisher serves as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in Peace and International Security.
In July 2017, Nancy Kanwisher was elected a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, the United Kingdom's national academy for the humanities and social sciences.
Nancy Kanwisher has training in cognitive psychology, which is investigating how the mind works by observing its outward behavior.
Nancy Kanwisher is credited with co-discovering and characterizing the fusiform face area in the human brain, a region whose function appears to be the recognition of fine distinctions between well-known objects and, in particular, faces.
Nancy Kanwisher co-discovered the parahippocampal place area, a region of the brain that recognizes environmental scenes.
Nancy Kanwisher uses ECOG to study audition, language processing, and social perception.
Nancy Kanwisher gave a 2014 TED Talk entitled "A Neural Portrait of the Human Mind".