Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist and linguist, who has garnered recognition for advocating evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. At present, he serves as the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. A native of Quebec, Pinker grew up in a middle-class but well-educated family. In 1979, he received his Doctorate of Philosophy in experimental psychology from Harvard University and subsequently, spent a year as a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Pinker then began his professional career as an assistant professor at Harvard and Stanford. In the ensuing years, he also taught at MIT; University of California, Santa Barbara; and New College of the Humanities, London. As a visual cognition and psycholinguistics specialist, he has researched about children's language development, mental imagery, shape recognition, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, visual attention, and the psychology of cooperation and communication, including euphemism, innuendo, emotional expression, and common knowledge. He is also a popular science author and has published eight books for general readers as well as several technical books. Over the course of his illustrious career, he has accumulated numerous awards and distinctions, including the Troland Award in 1993, Humanist of the Year award in 2006, and Richard Dawkins Award in 2013.