He asks audacious questions about the functions of the human mind, and then boldly sets out to answer them. Steven Pinker is enormously popular in the mainstream media, highly respected in scientific circles and known internationally for his brilliance, his verve, and his innovative ideas, while his lectures routinely draw thousands of listeners to packed auditoriums.

Steven Pinker is currently a faculty member at Harvard University, where he is Johnstone Professor of Psychology. He is the author of numerous bestselling books, including the 2002 New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize Finalist The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature, the 1998 Pulitzer finalist How The Mind Works, his 1994 classic The Language Instinct. The book that popularized his own research was Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language. Steven Pinker has also published countless academic and popular articles, including pieces in The New York Times, Nature, and Time.

Pinker was born in Montreal, and received his BA from McGill University in 1976 and his PhD in psychology from Harvard in 1979. His academic career led him to Harvard, Stanford, and MIT before he took up 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, Pinker has won a number of teaching prizes, and has been named among Newsweek's "100 Americans for the Next Century" is included in Esquire's "Register of Outstanding Men and Women," and was recently named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World Today.