Dedre Gentner
American psychologist
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Early life and education
Gentner was born in San Diego, California. She received her bachelor's degree in physics from UC Berkeley during the 1970s and did graduate work in physics at the University of Chicago, before discovering the field of cognitive psychology. After a year studying cognitive science at U. Chicago, Gentner taught first grade for two years in Ghana, sparking an enduring interest in cognitive development. She then entered the graduate program at UC San Diego working with Don Norman and David Rumelhart, receiving her PhD in 1974. She taught at the University of Washington, served as Research Scientist at Bolt Beranek and Newman, and taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign before joining Northwestern University in 1990, her current position. Gentner co-founded Northwestern's Cognitive Science Program and the Undergraduate Major in Cognitive Science in 1991-92 and was Director of the Cognitive Science Program from 1991 to 2015. During this time the Program grew to over 100 faculty, spanning Psychology, Linguistics, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence, Learning Science, Neuroscience, Anthropology, Communication Sciences and Disorders, and Music Cognition.
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Awards and fellowships
Gentner received an Alexander von Humboldt Research Award in 2011. She received the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award from the American Psychological Association in 2016. That same year, she was awarded the 2016 Rumelhart Prize for Contributions to the Theoretical Foundations of Human Cognition. She is a Fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the American Association for Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Cognitive Development Society, and the Society for Experimental Psychology. She has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University (1999-2000), at the Rockefeller Institute in Bellagio, Italy (2006), and at the Humboldt Foundation (Delmenhorst, Germany).
She is a member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences.