FOR MORE INFORMATION

CONTACT:  Susie P. Gonzalez

susie.gonzalez@trinity.edu

Aug. 21, 2006

Harvard Psychologist to Share Findings of Human Nature During Trinity University Lecture

SAN ANTONIO – Steven Pinker, a psychology professor at Harvard University who is considered a leading cognitive scientist, will present the Trinity University DeCoursey Lecture for the 2006-07 academic year at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 19 in Laurie Auditorium. The title of his talk is “The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.” His presentation is free and open to the public.

Professor Pinker was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential thinkers of 2004 and was named to Newsweek's "100 Americans for the Next Century." He is known for asking probing questions about the functions of the human mind and then boldly setting out to answer them. Because of his intellect and innovative ideas, he has been quoted widely in the mainstream media while being respected in scientific circles.

After teaching for 21 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he recently was named the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of the 2002 New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize finalist, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature and also was a finalist for the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for How The Mind Works. Other works include The Language Instinct, and the book popularizing his research, Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. He has also published numerous academic and popular articles, including pieces in The New York Times, Nature, and Time.

A native of Montreal, Professor Pinker received his BA from McGill University in 1976 and his doctorate in psychology from Harvard in 1979. He taught at Harvard, Stanford, and MIT before assuming his current endowed professorship at Harvard. He is a fellow of several scholarly societies, including the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has received numerous awards, including the Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences and five prizes from the American Psychological Association. In addition to this recognition for his research, Professor Pinker has won a number of teaching prizes.

Doors to Laurie Auditorium will open at 6:30 p.m. on the evening of the lecture.  The lecture series is made possible by a gift from the late Gen. Elbert DeCoursey and Mrs. DeCoursey of San Antonio.

For more information, contact Trinity’s department of academic affairs at (210) 999-8201.

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