Northwestern graduation events set for 2026
October 28, 2025
Dedre Gentner has received the 2025 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science from the Franklin Institute, which for more than two centuries has honored the world’s most influential scientists, engineers and inventors who have made significant advances in science and technology.
Gentner is the Alice Gabrielle Twight Professor of Psychology at Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and at the School of Education and Social Policy at Northwestern. She helped found the Cognitive Science Program and directed it for over two decades. She is the co-principal investigator of the Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center at Northwestern. Her research focuses on language, learning and analogical processing, which is the process of comparing two objects or situations to facilitate learning and insight.
The Franklin Institute cited Gentner for “elucidating the unique power of human thought, including its roots in the acquisition and use of language, metaphors, maps and analogies, and for charting new ways to support and enhance these skills.”
The Franklin Institute will honor Gentner and five other researchers across disciplines at an award ceremony on Monday, April 20 in Philadelphia.
Gentner is widely recognized for her work on mental models and on the development of cognition and language. Her structure-mapping theory has led to insights on the role of relations in conceptual processing and to a computational model of analogy and similarity.
She is a fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society and an inaugural fellow of the Cognitive Science Society.
Additional honors include the David E. Rumelhart Prize in Cognitive Science, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Award and the William James Award from the Association for Psychological Science.
Founded in 1824 to honor Benjamin Franklin, the Franklin Institute recognizes excellence in science and technology through its annual awards. Previous recipients include Nicola Tesla, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein.
Previous Northwestern recipients include John Rogers, the Louis Simpson and Kimberly Querry Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Neurological Surgery in 2019; and Manijeh Razeghi, the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering in 2018.
