Steven Pinker, Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, is a cognitive scientist widely known for his work on visual cognition and the psychology of language. Educated at Dawson College in Montreal, he earned a first class honors degree in psychology at McGill University and a Ph.D. in experimental psychology at Harvard in 1979. He went on to take a post-doctoral fellowship at the Center for Cognitive Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) then joined Harvard’s psychology faculty as an assistant professor in 1980. He accepted an appointment at Stanford University the next year then returned to MIT as an assistant professor of psychology in 1982. Named co-director of the Center for Cognitive Science three years later, he was promoted to full professor in 1989 and appointed director of the McDonnell-Pew Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at MIT in 1994. He became MIT’s Peter de Florez Professor in 2000 and accepted the Johnstone Family Professorship at Harvard in 2003. He was named a Harvard College Professor in recognition of excellence in teaching last year. Dr. Pinker’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and American Council of Learned Societies. It has won him prizes awarded by The Royal Institution of Great Britain, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Psychological Association. The recipient of six honorary degrees, he serves as honorary president of the Canadian Psychological Association and has been recognized for his scientific influence and leadership by Esquire, Newsweek, Time, 02138 Magazine, Foreign Policy, and Britain’s Prospect magazine. He received the American Humanist Association’s Humanist of the Year Award in 2006 for his contributions to public understanding of human evolution. Dr. Pinker is the Herbert Simon Fellow of the American Academy of Political and Social Science and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Linguistics Society of America, the Académie Internationale de Philosophie des Science, the American Psychological Association (APA), the American Psychological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. A member of the editorial boards of eighteen academic journals, he is chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary and a contributing editor of The New Republic and of Seed. In addition to more than 120 papers published in scientific journals or as contributions to volumes of collected works, he is the editor or co-editor of four books and the author of eight others, including three books that each won the APA’s William James Award and have been translated into numerous languages: The Language Instinct (1994), winner of a Public Interest Award given by the Linguistic Society of America; How the Mind Works (1997), winner of a Los Angles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology and the Good Book Guide Award for the Best Science Book of 1998; and The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature (2002), winner of a Kistler Book Award given by the Foundation of the Future and the APA’s Eleanor Maccoby Book Award. His most recent book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, published in 2007 by Viking in New York and Penguin in London, is an analysis of how our words relate to thoughts and the world around us. Dr. Pinker is currently working on a book about the historical decline in violence and its psychological roots for Penguin.