Nancy Kanwisher is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Mc Govern Institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She earned her bachelor's degree in biology and PhD at MIT. Kanwisher's groundbreaking research has been pivotal in mapping human cognitive processes to specific brain regions. Following her landmark discovery in 1997 of the fusiform face area's role in facial recognition, she has identified brain regions responsible for processing places, bodies, sentence meaning, and music, significantly advancing the understanding of the brain's functional organization. Kanwisher's achievements have been recognized with prestigious awards, including the Troland Research Award and the NAS Award in the Neurosciences. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Arts and Sciences.

In 2024, Nancy Kanwisher was awarded the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience together with Doris Tsao and Winrich Freiwald for the discovery of a highly localized and specialized system for representation of faces in human and non-human primate neocortex.