Patricia Churchland

Biography

Early life and education

Churchland was born Patricia Smith in Oliver, British Columbia, and raised on a farm in the South Okanagan valley. Both of her parents lacked a high-school education; her father and mother left school after grades 6 and 8 respectively. Her mother was a nurse and her father worked in newspaper publishing in addition to running the family farm. In spite of their limited education, Churchland has described her parents as interested in the sciences, and the worldview they instilled in her as a secular one. She has also described her parents as eager for her to attend college, and though many farmers in their community thought this "hilarious and a grotesque waste of money", they saw to it that she did so. She took her undergraduate degree at the University of British Columbia, graduating with honors in 1965. She received a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to study at the University of Pittsburgh, where she took an M.A. in 1966. Thereafter she studied at Somerville College, Oxford as a British Council and Canada Council Fellow, obtaining a B. Phil in 1969.

Academic career

Churchland's first academic appointment was at the University of Manitoba, where she was an assistant professor from 1969 to 1977, an associate professor from 1977 to 1982, and promoted to a full professorship in 1983. It was here that she began to make a formal study of neuroscience with the help and encouragement of Larry Jordan, a professor with a lab in the Department of Physiology there. From 1982 to 1983 she was a Visiting Member in Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In 1984, she was invited to take up a professorship in the department of philosophy at UCSD, and relocated there with her husband Paul, where both have remained since. Since 1989, she has also held an adjunct professorship at the Salk Institute adjacent to UCSD's campus, where she became acquainted with Jonas Salk whose name the Institute bears. Describing Salk, Churchland has said that he "liked the idea of neurophilosophy, and he gave me a tremendous amount of encouragement at a time when many other people thought that we were, frankly, out to lunch." Another important supporter Churchland found at the Salk Institute was Francis Crick. At the Salk Institute, Churchland has worked with Terrence Sejnowski's lab as a research collaborator. Her collaboration with Sejnowski culminated in a book, The Computational Brain (MIT Press, 1993), co-authored with Sejnowski. Churchland was named the UC President's Professor of Philosophy in 1999, and served as Chair of the Philosophy Department at UCSD from 2000-2007.

She attended and was a speaker at the secularist Beyond Belief symposia in 2006, 2007, and 2008.