STEVEN PINKER, PH.D. - Cognitive Scientist
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Steven Pinker, a native of Montreal, received his BA from McGill University in 1976, and his PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1979. After serving on the faculties of Harvard and Stanford Universities, each for one year, he moved to MIT in 1982, where he spent 21 years before returning to Harvard in 2003 as the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology.

Professor Pinker’s research has focused on visual cognition and the psychology of language. It has been reported in two technical books and many journal articles, and won the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and two prizes from the American Psychological Association. Pinker has also received awards for graduate and undergraduate teaching, two prizes for general achievement, three honorary doctorates, and eight awards for his critically-acclaimed popular science books, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. The latter two were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Nonfiction.

Pinker is an elected fellow of several scholarly societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Neuroscience Research Program. He is an associate editor of Cognition and serves on many professional panels, such as the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, the Scientific Advisory Panel of the Evolution series on NOVA, and the Endangered Language Fund. Professor Pinker also writes in the popular press, including The New York Times, Time, The New Yorker and Technology Review.