Nancy Kanwisher

Nancy Kanwisher
Nancy
Kanwisher
Research Module Co-Leader
Department:  Brain & Cognitive Sciences Department

Associated Research Module: 

Associated Research Thrust: 

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. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2005 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2009.

The Kanwisher lab has used brain imaging to identify regions of the brain that play highly specialized roles in perception and cognition, including the perception of faces, places, and bodies, as well as various aspects of social cognition and language processing. Each of these regions can be identified robustly in a short functional scan in essentially every normal subject; they are part of the basic functional organization of the human mind and brain. In ongoing work the Kanwisher lab is working to better characterize the precise computations that occur in each region, to discover new functionally specific brain regions, and to understand how these regions get wired up in development and how they work together to produce cognition.

Email:  ngk@mit.edu
Room:  46-4133
Phone:  (617) 258-0721

Current Advisees

Jessica Chomik-Morales - Post-baccalaureate
Willian De Faria - Post-baccalaureate
Kamila Jozwik - Postdoc
Heather L Kosakowski - Graduate Student
Thomas O'Connell - Postdoc
Vivian Paulun - Postdoc
R.T. Pramod - Postdoc
Aryan Zoroufi - Graduate Student

Past Advisees

Michael Cohen - Postdoc
Katharina Dobs - Research Affiliate
Elizabeth Merritt Eastman - Graduate Student
Bernhard Egger - Postdoc
Rosa Lafer-Sousa - Graduate Student
Matthew Peterson - Postdoc
Sarah Schwettmann - Postdoc

Projects

CBMM Publications

K. Dobs, Isik, L., Pantazis, D., and Kanwisher, N., How face perception unfolds over time, Nature Communications, vol. 10, no. 1, 2019.
N. Kanwisher, The Quest for the FFA and Where It Led, The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 37, no. 5, pp. 1056 - 1061, 2017.
L. Isik, Koldewyn, K., Beeler, D., and Kanwisher, N., Perceiving social interactions in the posterior superior temporal sulcus, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 114, no. 43, 2017.
J. Fischer, Mikhael, J. G., Tenenbaum, J. B., and Kanwisher, N., Functional neuroanatomy of intuitive physical inference, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 113, no. 34, pp. E5072 - E5081, 2016.
B. Deen, Kanwisher, N., and Saxe, R., Functional organization of the human superior temporal sulcus, Organization for Human Brain Mapping (OHBM 2015). Honolulu, HI, 2015.