Rebecca R. Saxe

Rebecca Saxe is an associate investigator of the McGovern Institute and the John W. Jarve Professor in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

A leading scholar in human social cognition, she is best known for her discovery of a brain region that is specialized for “theory of mind” tasks that involve understanding the mental states of other people. Saxe continues to study this region and its role in social cognition. She has shown that it is involved when we make moral judgements about other people, and she is also exploring its possible role in autism, a condition in which the ability to understand other people’s beliefs and motivations is often impaired.

Her awards include a Young Global Leader award from the World Economic Forum, a Troland Award from the National Academy of Sciences, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. She obtained her Ph.D. from MIT and was a Harvard Junior Fellow before joining the MIT faculty. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.