Kistler Prize
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2006 Recipient
Visiting Professor of Psychology
Simon Fraser University
 Dr.
Doreen Kimura, behavioral neuroscientist, currently Visiting Professor
in the Department of Psychology at Simon Fraser University, British
Columbia, Canada, is the Kistler Prize winner for the year 2006. The
Prize is given annually by the Foundation For the Future to recognize
original work investigating the implications of genetics for human
society.
Born in 1933 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Kimura taught in a one-room
rural schoolhouse before earning a series of degrees from McGill University,
Montreal: B.A. in psychology in 1956, M.A. in experimental psychology
in 1957, and Ph.D. in physiological psychology in 1961. She was a professor
for over 30 years at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada,
prior to accepting her current position at Simon Fraser University.
In her early work, Kimura studied the differences in the language
and music processing capabilities of the left and right sides of the
brain. Her early articles and papers on cerebral lateralization greatly
influenced the field of human neuropsychology and are still some of
the most widely cited in experimental psychology. In the 1970s and
1980s, her experiments in both neurological patients and healthy individuals
demonstrated a critical link between speech and the production of other
complex movements. Her books on this research include Speech
and Language (Birkhauser Verlag, 1988) and Neuromotor
Mechanisms in Human Communication (Oxford University Press, 1993).
The work for which Dr. Kimura was
awarded the Kistler Prize is her research on sex differences in cognition.
Despite the highly charged nature
of the subject in the social-political environment, she catalogued
numerous sex differences in cognition and developed proximate and evolutionary
explanations for many of them. Her book Sex and
Cognition (MIT Press,
1999) summarizes her research findings in this area. Sex
and Cognition has been translated into French, Japanese, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese,
and Polish.
Among earlier awards and honors Dr. Kimura has received
are the Canadian Psychology Association Award for Distinguished Contributions
to Canadian Psychology as a Science (1985), the Canadian Association
for Women in Science Award for Outstanding Scientific Achievement (1986),
and the Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award by the Canadian
Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (2005). She is a
Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and a recipient of honorary degrees
from Queen’s University and Simon Fraser University.
In her speech
accepting the Kistler Prize, Dr. Kimura noted that some individuals
claim that studies such as hers should not be done. “My
response to that is simply the principle that there should be no bar
in a free society to asking any questions that can be answered by evidence,” said
Kimura. “This is a fundamental tenet of science, and I think
that it is a basic requirement for an open society.” In line
with her continuing interest in maintaining academic freedom, she was
founding president of the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship,
which advocates the merit principle and academic freedom in Canadian
universities.
“In the course of my research on both normal people and
people with brain damage, differences often appeared between men and women
in how problems were solved, which necessarily had to proceed from some difference
in brain organization. … Some of the differences appear early in
life, by three or four years of age, before formal schooling. Sex differences
paralleling those in humans appear also in nonhumans.”
—From Dr. Kimura’s acceptance speech at the 2006 Kistler Prize
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