Two Women From American Universities Will Be Awarded Heineken Prizes

The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences recently announced the winners of the 2018 Heineken Prizes in six major categories. Each winner receives $200,000 and will be honored at a ceremony in Amsterdam in September. Two of the six winners are women who teach at American universities.

Xiaowei Zhuang, professor of physics, chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University will be awarded the Heineken Prize in biochemistry and biophysics. She is being honored for her development of imaging methods to present visualization of what is happening inside cells. A native of Rugao, China, Dr. Zhuang earned a Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley. She came to Harvard in 2001 as a postdoctoral researcher. In 2014, Dr. Zhuang was named the David B. Arnold Professor of Science at Harvard. She is the director of the university’s Center for Advanced Imaging.

Nancy Kanwisher will be awarded the Heineken Prize in cognitive science. Dr. Kanwisher is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is being honored to her work using neuroimaging on the functional organization of the human brain. A native of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Dr. Kanwisher earned a bachelor’s degree in biology and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology at MIT. She then joined the faculty of the psychology department at Harvard University. She later taught at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of California, Los Angeles before returning to Massachusetts in 1994.