Steven Pinker, a native of Montreal, received his B.A. from McGill
University in 1976 and his Ph.D. in psychology from Harvard in 1979.
After teaching at Harvard and Stanford Universities, he moved to MIT
in 1982, where he is currently Professor in the Department of Brain
and Cognitive Sciences and Director of the McDonnell-Pew
Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. He has studied many aspects of language
and of visual cognition, with a focus on language development in children.
He has received research prizes from the National Academy of Sciences
and the American Psychological Association and a teaching prize from
MIT. His 1994 book, The Language Instinct, was named among the
ten best books of 1994 by the New York Times and other newspapers,
and won prizes from the American Psychological Association and the Linguistics
Society of America. His latest book, How the Mind Works, won
the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and the APA's William James
Book Prize, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National
Book Critics' Circle Award. Pinker has also written for Time,
The New Yorker, and other magazines.
