Barbara Finlay

Barbara Finlay was an American neuroscientist and psychologist who spent four decades on the Cornell University faculty and reshaped how colleagues thought about brain development and evolution. She died on 12 September 2026 at the age of 75, Cornell Chronicle reported.

Born in 1950 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Finlay earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from Oberlin College in 1972 and a Ph.D. in brain and cognitive sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1976. She joined Cornell's College of Arts and Sciences that same year and remained a central figure in the psychology department until retiring in 2016 as the W.R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology Emerita.

Her early research on the neurobiological development of the optic nerve produced a Nature paper in her first year as a junior professor. Over the following decades she published widely across neuroscience and psychology, pressing the field beyond fashionable first principles toward deeper accounts of how brains develop and evolve. Colleagues described her as a maverick who asked hard questions about the true roots of brain function rather than following the mode of the day. In 2024 the Cajal Club awarded her the Pinkney J. Harman Award for extraordinary work on evolution of the cortex and the nervous system.

At Cornell she served as director of graduate studies and as department chair. She edited the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences for more than twenty years and established the Larry Taylor Lecture series. Faculty who arrived as outsiders to psychology credited her with opening doors and building an intellectual home in Ithaca. She was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Association for Psychological Science.

Finlay is survived by her daughter Laura and Laura's wife Casey and their son Vaughn, and by her son Will and his wife Heather. The family asked that donations be made to Wikipedia or the Finger Lakes Independence Center, and a festschrift symposium was planned for the spring after her death. Her legacy at Cornell is a department culture that valued rigorous, creative and sometimes contrarian thinking about the roots of brain function.