Nancy Kanwisher

Nancy Kanwisher is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT's Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences and an Investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She holds a B.S. (1980) and Ph.D. (1986) from MIT, followed by a MacArthur Fellowship (1986-1988). Her career includes faculty roles at UCLA and Harvard before returning to MIT in 1997.

Her research focuses on the brain's functional organization, identifying regions specialized for visual perception (faces, places, bodies, words), language, and social cognition. Her lab uses fMRI, intracranial recordings, and deep neural networks to explore how the brain processes information. Key discoveries include the fusiform face area (FFA), parahippocampal place area (PPA), and evidence for innate and experience-dependent cortical specialization.

Recent work examines the developmental origins of brain regions, the role of artificial neural networks in modeling brain computations, and the neural basis of intuitive physics. Her lab has pioneered methods like functional ROI analysis and voxel decomposition to dissect brain function.

Award highlights include the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience (2024), António Champalimaud Vision Award (2025), and Carvalho-Heineken Prize (2018). She has advised numerous students and postdocs, contributing to foundational studies in cognitive neuroscience.

Teaching includes the undergraduate course The Human Brain, with publicly available lecture materials. Her lab's work bridges basic science and clinical applications, exploring how neural organization relates to disorders like prosopagnosia.