Introduction
Stevan Robert Harnad (Hernád István Róbert, Hesslein István, born June 2, 1945, Budapest) is a cognitive scientist.
Education
Harnad was born in Budapest, Hungary. He did his undergraduate work at McGill University and his graduate work at Princeton University's Department of Psychology. Harnad completed his Master of Arts degree in Psychology from McGill University in 1969, his Doctor of Philosophy degree from Princeton University in 1992. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by University of Liège in 2013.
Research
Harnad's research interests are in cognitive science and open access. He is currently professor of psychology at Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) and professor of cognitive science at the University of Southampton. Elected external member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2001 (resigned, 8 October 2016), he was Canada Research Chair in cognitive science 2001-2015. His research is on categorization, communication, cognition, and consciousness and he has written extensively on categorical perception, symbol grounding, origin of language, lateralization, the Turing test, distributed cognition, scientometrics, and consciousness. Harnad is a former student of Donald O. Hebb and Julian Jaynes.
Research publishing and open access
In 1978, Harnad was the founder of Behavioral and Brain Sciences, of which he remained editor-in-chief until 2002. In addition, he founded Psycoloquy (an early electronic journal sponsored by the American Psychological Association), CogPrints (an electronic eprint archive in the cognitive sciences hosted by the University of Southampton), and the American Scientist Open Access Forum (since 1998; now the Global Open Access List, GOAL). Harnad is an active promoter of open access, EPrints, Enabling Open Scholarship (EOS), Open Access Scholarly Information Sourcebook (OASIS), Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and its Campus Open Access Policies.Harnad is currently Editor-in-Chief of the refereed journal Animal Sentience
Political activism
Harnad is the author of a 2011 open letter signed by over 60 external members of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences addressed to the Academy's President, József Pálinkás, concerning the press and police harassment campaign against Hungarian philosophers who were critics of the current Hungarian ruling party, Fidesz, and its prime minister, Viktor Orbán.
Harnad is also on the Board of Directors of the Canadian-Hungarian Democratic Charter, an organization launched in 2011 on the 55th anniversary of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 against Soviet domination. According to its definition, the charter's goal is to help support democracy in Hungary against what it sees as the increasingly undemocratic developments currently taking place under Viktor Orbán and the Fidesz party.
Animal welfare
Harnad is Editor-in-Chief of the refereed journal Animal Sentience launched in 2015 by the Institute of Science and Policy of The Humane Society of the United States. A vegan, Harnad is increasingly active in animal welfare, animal rights. and animal law.