Monday, May 18, 2026, 12:30 – 2:00 pm, Talk Room 2
The Vision Sciences Society is honored to present Nancy Kanwisher with the 2026 Ken Nakayama Medal for Excellence in Vision Science.
The Ken Nakayama Medal is in honor of Professor Ken Nakayama’s contributions to the Vision Sciences Society, as well as his innovations and excellence in the domain of vision sciences.
The winner of the Ken Nakayama Medal receives this honor for high-impact work that has made a lasting contribution in vision science in the broadest sense. The nature of this work can be fundamental, clinical or applied.
Nancy Kanwisher
Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Investigator, McGovern Institute
Nancy Kanwisher’s lasting contributions to vision science include her pioneering use of functional brain imaging to discover category-selective regions in the human visual cortex, for example the fusiform face area (FFA), parahippocampal place area (PPA), and extrastriate body area (EBA). These discoveries and more recent work that goes beyond vision to include domains such as language and theory of mind have advanced functional specialization as a core principle that shapes how we conceptualize neural information processing. Importantly, her work encompasses more than the delineation of specific brain areas and their response properties to provide in-depth characterization of the role they play in multiple aspects of perceptual, attentional, and cognitive processing. More recently, her interest in uncovering broad principles of brain organization has extended to computational approaches, including work demonstrating how functional specialization can emerge in network models trained to perform multiple distinct categorization tasks. In addition to her extensive scientific contributions, Kanwisher has been an exceptional mentor, inspiring and championing generations of vision scientists who have made important discoveries of their own.
Nancy Kanwisher received her B.S. and Ph.D. from MIT, under the supervison of Professor Molly Potter. She completed a postdoctoral fellowship as a MacArthur Fellow in Peace and International Security, and a second fellowship in the lab of Anne Treisman at UC Berkeley. She subsequently held faculty positions at UCLA and then Harvard, before returning to MIT in 1997, where she is now the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT. Kanwisher has received the Troland Award, the Golden Brain Award, the Carvalho-Heineken Prize, the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, the António Champalimaud Vision Award, a MacVicar Faculty Fellow teaching award from MIT, and the Vision Science Society Davida Teller Award. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the British Academy, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.