Frank Keil received a B.S. in Biology from MIT in 1973, a M.A. in Psychology from Stanford in 1975, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. He was a faculty member in the Psychology Department at Cornell University from 1977-1998. Since 1998 he has been a Professor of Psychology, and of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Yale University. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He has received national awards for his work in cognition and cognitive development, as well as a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health in 2003. His recent work focuses on how children and adults grasp the causal structure of the world around them and how they cope with explanatory gaps. He is the author of Semantic and Conceptual Development: An Ontological Perspective (1979, Harvard Univ. Press) and Concepts, Kinds and Cognitive Development (1989, MIT Press), and co-editor (with philosopher Robert Wilson) of The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (1999, MIT Press), and (also with Wilson) of Explanation and Cognition (2000, MIT Press). The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences received the award of “Outstanding book in Psychology, 1999” by the Association of American Publishers. His lecture course and seminars focus on aspects of cognition and cognitive development.
