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• November 2010

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• October 2010

11th Annual Kistler Prize

• September 2010

“Managing the Future”

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“Water – The Crisis Ahead”

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Awards

Kistler Prize

 

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2006 Recipient

Dr. Doreen Kimura, FRSC

Visiting Professor of Psychology
Simon Fraser University

Dr. Doreen KimuraDr. 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 Banquet