2013 Moment Magazine Award Recipient:

Steven Pinker is an experimental psychologist and one of the world’s foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature.

Currently Harvard College Professor and Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Pinker has also taught at Stanford and MIT. His research on visual cognition and the psychology of language has won prizes from the National Academy of Sciences, the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the American Psychological Association.

He has also received seven honorary doctorates, several teaching awards at MIT and Harvard, and numerous prizes for his books The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, and The Blank Slate. He is Chair of the Usage Panel of the American Heritage Dictionary, and often writes for The New York Times, Time, and The New Republic.

The Montreal-born Pinker is the author of six books, including The Better Angles of Our Nature, which was named one of the New York Times’ Notable Books of 2011. His work has won the William James Book Prize three times, the Los Angeles Times Science Book Prize and the Eleanor Maccoby Book Prize.

Pinker lives in Boston and Truro, Massachusetts, with Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, a philosopher and novelist.