Official Story
Nancy Kanwisher received her B.S. and Ph.D. from MIT, working with Professor Molly Potter. After a postdoc as a MacArthur Fellow in Peace and International Security, and a second postdoc in the lab of Anne Treisman at UC Berkeley, she held faculty positions at UCLA and then Harvard, before returning to MIT in 1997, where she is now an Investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research, a faculty member in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, and a member of the Center for Minds, Brains, and Machines. Kanwisher uses brain imaging and other methods to discover the functional organization of the human brain as a window into the architecture of the mind. Kanwisher has received the Troland Award, the Golden Brain Award, the Carvalho-Heineken Prize, and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow teaching Award from MIT, and she is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. You can view her short lectures about human cognitive neuroscience for lay audiences and newcomers to the field here: www.nancysbraintalks.mit.edu.
Unofficial Story
I grew up in Woods Hole where nearly everyone was a scientist (well, all our dads were, only a very few moms). But I wanted to be a journalist, and dropped out of grad school several times to try it. Once I took a summer off interning at the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco. Another time I flew to Managua at the peak of the Contra war, faked myself a press pass, hitch hiked all over the country in army jeeps, and hung out at the Hotel Intercontinental pool where the US spooks running the war out of Honduras used to hang out. I think the main reasons I didn't become a journalist are: i) I dont write fast or well enough, ii) my amazingly patient and understanding graduate advisor Molly Potter took me back after each of these daliances, and iii) my partner received the journalism fellowship we both applied for after our Ph.D.s and I did not. At the time I was furious, but it has turned out fine. I still cannot believe my luck to get to study the human mind and brain, and to work students and colleagues who blow me away every day with their kindness and intellect.