She is the Alice Gabriel Twight Professor of Psychology at Northwestern University, and a leading researcher in the study of analogical reasoning.
These ideas are vital underpinnings of a science of learning, fostering the creation of powerful learning tools that build on foundational human thinking skills and enabling new insights into human development.” [4] Her work on structure-mapping theory was foundational for the development of the structure mapping engine by Ken Forbus.
[5] This involves the mapping of knowledge from one domain into another or from the base to the target for the purpose of guiding reasoning, to develop conjectures, and to generalize experiences into abstract schema.
Dedre Gentner, the recipient of the 2016 Rumelhart Prize, personifies the success of Cognitive Science as an interdisciplinary enterprise, tackling foundational questions about the mind through the seamless integration of psychological theory, empirical methodology, and computational insight.
Gentner has made important contributions to the study of verbs, mental models, similarity, language and thought, as well as word learning in children.
She then entered the graduate program at UC San Diego working with Don Norman and David Rumelhart, receiving her PhD in 1974.
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).