Following in their footsteps
By her own account, Nancy Kanwisher ’80 PhD ’86 barely made it through graduate school at MIT. Today, Kanwisher is MIT's Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience. But for two years as a doctoral candidate, all of her research projects failed. "You can be smart and have good ideas, and get crummy data," Kanwisher said Saturday during a panel discussion about women in science. "My experiments were bombing." More than once, her adviser, psychology professor Mary Potter, talked Kanwisher out of quitting. And then there were Kanwisher's outside interests. One summer in the 1980s, Kanwisher took a month off from her studies to file journalistic dispatches from the war in Nicaragua. The next summer, she got a proper fellowship — not for brain research, but at a journalism program in San Francisco. Potter not only tolerated these activities, but edited an article Kanwisher wrote about her...