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BiographiesLeading thinkers and experts from around the world present their views on the many facets of humanness in seven disciplines. Panelists include:
John Allman John Allman, neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, is a recognized expert on primates, cognition and evolutionary neuroscience. His interests lie in the evolutionary and ontogenetic development of the brain. Since 1999, Allman's laboratory has focused on the Von Economo neurons (VENs, also known as spindle cells) which are a specialization in the brains of apes and humans, where they are particularly abundant. The VENs play a key role in the circuitry involved in social emotions such as empathy. They are the specific target of a type of fronto-temporal dementia that destroys social and self awareness. The VENs may also play a role in several other neuropsychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, depression and autism. Allman studies brain evolution in primates from multiple perspectives, including gene expression and the tracing of fiber pathways through the use of diffusion tensor imaging based on high resolution MRI. Recently he has extended his research to include another group of mammals with big brains, the elephants. Raffaella Commitante Raffaella Commitante received her doctorate from University of Cambridge, UK and her MA from California State University, Fullerton. Her work has focused on behavioral and physiological stress in orangutans with much of the comparative research drawn from human studies. She is currently an adjunct professor at California State University, Fullerton and is also investigating the development of a cortisol testing field kit for in situ studies relating to non-human primate stress levels. Miguel Angel Corzo Miguel Angel Corzo, President and CEO of The Colburn School, is known and admired internationally for his leadership and advocacy in the arts, in education and in the worldwide movement for sustainable development. Before joining The Colburn School in July, 2007, he served as president and CEO of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, an institution recognized for inspiring and educating innovative artists and creative leadersand home of the Miguel Angel Corzo Center for the Creative Economy, named by the University in his honor. A Mexican-born U.S. citizen, Mr. Corzo was the Under Secretary of State at the Ministry of Tourism in Mexico, a technical advisor to the Minister of Human Settlements and Public Works, and the founding Dean for Academic Affairs at the Metropolitan University. He was the director of the Getty Conservation Institute in Los Angeles, where he developed projects in over 40 countries. He has served as President and CEO of the Friends of the Arts of Mexico Foundation, where he was instrumental in the organization of the successful exhibition Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, a very successful exhibition that traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. He was twice appointed by President Clinton to serve on the President's Advisory Committee on Cultural Property. After receiving his undergraduate degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, Mr. Corzo did his doctoral work at the Technische Universität in Munich and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University. He is the recipient of UNESCO'S distinguished Medal of Patron of the Arts along with Vaclav Havel, Yehudi Menuhin and King Juan Carlos of Spain. Other governmental honors and distinctions include the Gabarrón International Prize for Conservation and an honorary doctorate from the University of Lecce in Italy. He is the author or editor of 21 books, the producer of 15 television documentaries on arts and culture and has organized 16 museum exhibitions around the world. Antonio Damasio Antonio Damasio is David Dornsife Professor of Neuroscience and Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at the University of Southern California; he is also an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Damasio has made seminal contributions to the understanding of how the brain processes memory, language, emotions, and decisions and has described his discoveries in best selling books (Descartes' Error, The Feeling of What Happens, and Looking for Spinoza) translated into over 30 languages and taught in universities worldwide. He is the recipient of numerous awards (including, most recently, the Asturias Prize in Science and Technology, 2005; and the Signoret Prize, 2004, which he shared with his wife Hanna Damasio). Damasio is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences, and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts. He has been named "Highly Cited Researcher" by the Institute for Scientific Information. His current work is aimed at illuminating the brain basis of social behaviors (ranging from moral judgments and communication to economic decisions), and understanding mechanisms of creativity in art, science, and technology. Frans de Waal Dr. Frans B. M. de Waal is a Dutch-born ethologist/biologist known for his work on the social intelligence of primates. His first book, Chimpanzee Politics (1982) compared the schmoozing and scheming of chimpanzees involved in power struggles with that of human politicians. Ever since, de Waal has drawn parallels between primate and human behavior, from peacemaking and morality to culture. His scientific work has been published in hundreds of technical articles in journals such as Science, Nature, Scientific American, and outlets specialized in animal behavior. De Waal is also editor or co-editor on nine scientific volumes. His popular books - translated into fifteen languages - have made him one of the world's most visible primatologists. His latest books are Our Inner Ape and Primates & Philosophers. De Waal is C. H. Candler Professor in the Psychology Department of Emory University and Director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes National Primate Center, in Atlanta, Georgia. He has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (US), and the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences, and Time magazine recently selected him as one of the world's 100 Most Influential People. Marc Hauser Marc Hauser's research sits at the interface between evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience and is aimed at understanding the processes and consequences of cognitive evolution. Observations and experiments focus on human and nonhuman primates, incorporating methodological procedures and theoretical insights from behavioral ecology, infant cognitive development, evolutionary theory, cognitive neuroscience, biological anthropology, linguistics and philosophy. Current foci include: the nature of our moral judgments, the computations subserving our language faculty, the evolution of cooperation, economic decision making, conceptual representations in the domains of mathematics, space, language and music, and animal communication. Hauser received a BS in Animal Behavior from Bucknell University and a PhD from UCLA. Currently, Hauser is a Harvard College Professor, and Professor in the Departments of Psychology, Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, and Biological Anthropology. He is the co-director of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program at Harvard, and adjunct Professor in the Graduate School of Education and the Department of Anthropology. He is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Young Investigator Award, a Medal of Science from the College de France, and a Guggenheim Award. His work has frequently been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, NPR, ABC News, National Geographic, and several international newspapers and magazines. Hauser has published over 200 articles in major research journals as well as three multi-authored and three single-authored books: The Evolution of Communication; Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think; and Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong. William Hurlbut William B. Hurlbut is a physician and Consulting Professor at the Neuroscience Institute. After receiving his undergraduate and medical training at Stanford University, he completed postdoctoral studies in theology and medical ethics, studying with Robert Hamerton-Kelly, the Dean of the Chapel at Stanford, and subsequently at the Institut Catholique de Paris. His primary areas of interest involve the ethical issues associated with advancing biomedical technology, the biological basis of moral awareness, and studies in the integration of theology and philosophy of biology. He is author of numerous publications on science and ethics including the co-edited volume Altruism and Altruistic Love: Science, Philosophy, and Religion in Dialogue, and "Science, Religion and Human Spirit" in the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science. He is also co-chair of two interdisciplinary faculty projects at Stanford University, "Becoming Human: The Evolutionary Origins of Spiritual, Religious, and Moral Awareness," and "Brain, Mind and Emergence." In addition to teaching at Stanford, he has worked with NASA on projects in Astrobiology and is a member of the Chemical and Biological Warfare working group at the Center for International Security and Cooperation. Since 2002 he has served on the President's Council on Bioethics. He is the author of Altered Nuclear Transfer, a proposed technological solution to the moral controversy over embryonic stem cell research. David Hulme David Hulme holds a doctorate in International Relations from the University of Southern California with an emphasis on the Middle East. He has also studied theology, psychology and philosophy. He is the author of Identity, Ideology and the Jerusalem Question and a contributor to What Makes Us Human? by Charles Pasternak (ed). David Hulme is publisher of the quarterly journal, Vision, president of Vision Media Productions and chairman of Vision.org Foundation. Donald Johanson Dr. Donald Johanson is a respected paleoanthropologist, best known for his groundbreaking discoveries including the most widely known and thoroughly studied fossil find of the 20th century -- the Lucy skeleton. Lucy prompted on-going debate and major revisions in our knowledge and understanding of the human evolutionary past. The skeleton possessed an intriguing mixture of ape-like features such as a projecting face and small brain, but also characters we consider human such as upright walking. Lucy continues to be a diadem in the crown of hominid fossils and serves as an important touchstone for all subsequent discoveries. In the 34 years since Johanson earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, he has led field explorations in Ethiopia, Tanzania, and the Middle East, and effectively reached across multiple media platforms -- hosting and narrating the Emmy nominated PBS/NOVA series In Search of Human Origins, co-authoring eight books, and lecturing at universities, corporations, and public forums. Johanson founded and directs the Institute of Human Origins, a human-evolution think tank. He is an honorary board member of the Explorers Club, a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, and a distinguished member of the Siena Academy of Sciences in Italy. He also serves as the Virginia M. Ullman Chair in Human Origins at Arizona State University, where he teaches. His most recent book is From Lucy to Language. Don is currently at work on a new book, LUCY'S LEGACY: A fossil icon's legacy in the search for human origins. Christine Kenneally Christine Kenneally is an author and journalist who has written for The New Yorker, New Scientist, Slate, and many sections of The New York Times as well as other publications. Her book, The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language, was published in 2007. It was selected as a best read of the season or the year by USA Today, Seed magazine, Newsday and The Edge, and it was recently nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Christine has a Ph.D. in linguistics from Cambridge University and a B.A. from Melbourne University. She was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia, and now lives with her family in Brooklyn. Bruce Lahn Dr. Lahn is Professor of Human Genetic at the University of Chicago and also Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He received his B.A. in biology from Harvard University in 1991 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1998, where he did his doctoral research on mammalian sex chromosomes with David Page. He has been a faculty member at the University of Chicago since 1999, where he studies human evolutionary genetics, epigenetics, and stem cell biology. He is also co-founder and Scientific Director of the Center for Stem Cell Biology and Tissue Engineering at Sun Yat-sen University, China since 2004. Dr. Lahn's honors include the Merrill Lynch Forum Global Innovation Award, the TR100 Award from Technology Review magazine, the Burroughs Wellcome Career Award, and a Searle scholarship. He was named to Crain's Chicago Business magazine's list of rising stars in business, government and academia in 2004, and listed as one of Esquire magazine's "America's Best & Brightest" in 2005. Barbara Lambert Barbara had a long career as a Biomedical Scientist in the National Health Service before deciding on a major change; she gained a place at university to study art and design, and was awarded an M.A. in 2000. She now uses art to express her ideas on life and society. Barbara runs workshops for children and adults, some of whom are in residential care and others have learning disabilities. She firmly believes that everybody can derive pleasure and benefit from creative activity. Her ongoing research focuses on the origin and function of art; this is the subject of her paper "Making a Mark." Charles Pasternak Following his education at Oxford University, Charles Pasternak spent fifteen years on the staff of the Oxford Biochemistry Department, during which time he also held a teaching Fellowship at Worcester College, Oxford. He spent two years as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in the Pharmacology Department of Yale University Medical School, and subsequently held an Eleanor Roosevelt Fellowship of the International Union Against Cancer in the Department of Neurosciences at the University of California San Diego Medical School in La Jolla. In 1976 he was invited to move to St. George's Hospital Medical School (University of London) in order to set up a new Department of Biochemistry, which he subsequently expanded into a larger Department of Cellular and Molecular Sciences as founder-Chairman. He is currently Director of the Oxford International Biomedical Centre, which he founded in 1992. Charles Pasternak is known for his pioneering work on the surface membrane of animal cells, which is a key factor in the understanding of cancer and many infectious diseases. He has published over 250 original papers, reviews and book chapters on this topic, as well as on subjects of general interest. Charles Pasternak is active in promoting scientific collaboration and interchange; he is a member of the Executive Committee for a UNESCO initiative on Molecular and Cellular Biology, a member of the Education Committee of the International Union of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (IUBMB), a member of the International Advisory Board for the Chulabhorn Research Institute, Bangkok and the Scientific Board of Antenna Technologie, Geneva. In 1979 he founded the Cell Surface Research Fund in order to foster international research links and scientific meetings on various aspects of fundamental and clinical research on the cell surface. In 1993 he received the degree of Doctor Honoris Causa and Palade medal from the University of Bucharest, in 1995 the honour of Amigo de Venezuela from the Fundacion Venezuela Positiva and in 2002 was elected Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Charles Pasternak has served on several editorial committees including the Advisory Board of Current Topics in Membranes and Transport, and is the founder-Editor of Bioscience Reports: Molecular and Cellular Biology of the Cell Surface. His published works include Biochemistry of Differentiation (translated into Japanese), Introduction to Human Biochemistry (translated into half a dozen languages), and Quest: The Essence of Humanity. Jeffrey Schwartz Jeffrey M. Schwartz, M.D., a leading neuroscientist and research psychiatrist at UCLA School of medicine, is a seminal thinker and researcher in the field of self-directed neuroplasticity. He is the author of over 100 scientific publications in the fields of neuroscience and psychiatry. Schwartz has also authored three popular books with HarperCollins: Brain Lock: Free Yourself From Obsessive-Compulsive Behavior (1997), The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force (2002) and Dear Patrick: Letters to a Young Man (2003). His major research interest over the past two decades has been brain imaging/functional neuroanatomy and cognitive-behavioral therapy, with a focus on the pathological mechanisms and psychological treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). He has also been a devoted practitioner of mindfulness Arnold Schwartzman Arnold Schwartzman is an Academy Award® winning filmmaker and noted graphic designer. He moved from his native London to Hollywood in 1978. In 1982, Schwartzman was appointed the Director of Design for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games. He is also designer of a number of key elements for the Annual Academy Awards® ("Oscar®"), including commemorative posters, billboards, cinema trailers and printed programs for the Awards ceremony and Governors Ball. Schwartzman is producer, director and screenwriter of a number of films, including his Academy Award® winning documentary feature film GENOCIDE (1981); Echoes That Remain (1991), recipient of the 1992 Houston International Film Festival Gold Special Jury Award; LIBERATION (1994), selected for the Berlin International Film Festival; and Building A Dream, the story of the 1932 Los Angeles Olympic Games. He has created a number of short videos for the Museum of Tolerance, as well as a permanent eight-screen video exhibit and a "Time Line" mural for the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. Schwartzman is the author of a number of books on art and design and the recipient of many film and international design awards, including three Designers and Art Directors Association of London Silver awards. He was elected to the Alliance Graphique Internationale in 1974. In 2000, Schwartzman received the Pacific Design Center's Stars of Design Life Achievement Award for Graphic Design. Schwartzman was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) for services to the British film industry in the USA, and in 2006 was conferred the distinction of Royal Designer for Industry by the Royal Society of Arts (RDI). John Shea John J. Shea is Associate Professor of Anthropology and the Turkana Basin Institute at Stony Brook University in New York. He was born in Massachusetts and educated at Boston University (BA 1982) and Harvard University (Ph.D. 1991). Shea has excavated Stone Age sites in Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Tanzania, and most recently in West Lake Turkana, Kenya. He is also an expert flintknapper, who has demonstrated the production and use of stone tools in numerous television documentaries. Many of Shea's publications examine evidence for behavioral differences between Neandertals and early modern humans in the Near East and the origins of projectile technology. His forthcoming paper in the Journal of Human Evolution reports on archaeological evidence found with the oldest-known Homo sapiens fossils at Omo Kibish, Ethiopia. Shea is co-editor of the forthcoming book, Transitions in Prehistory. He is currently writing Before Genesis: Human Evolution in the Land of the Bible. Craig Stanford Dr. Craig Stanford is Professor of Anthropology and Biological Sciences at USC and Director of the USC Jane Goodall Research Center. He is an authority on human evolution and primate behavior, and has conducted research on primates, including our close relatives the chimpanzee and gorilla, for the past 20 years in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Craig Stanford's work has often focused on the ecological relationships among the primate species sharing a tropical forest ecosystem. He has conducted field studies in East Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and Central and South America. He also holds a research appointment in vertebrate biology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, and is involved in the biology and conservation of endangered tortoises in southeast Asia. Stanford is the author of more than a dozen books and hundreds of articles on human evolution and animal behavior topics. His latest book, Beautiful Minds (co-authored with Dr. Maddalena Bearzi of UCLA), is about the parallels between great apes and dolphins, and what they may tell us about the origins of human intelligence. Ian Tattersall Ian Tattersall, curator in the Department of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, has concentrated his research over the past quarter-century in two main areas: the analysis of the human fossil record, and the study of the ecology and systematics of the lemurs of Madagascar. Tattersall is also a prominent interpreter of human paleontology to the public, with several recent trade books to his credit, among them Extinct Humans, Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness, and The Last Neanderthal: The Rise, Success and Mysterious Extinction of Our Closest Human Relatives. He has also been responsible for several major exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, including Ancestors: Four Million Years of Humanity; Dark Caves, Bright Visions: Life in Ice Age Europe; and the Hall of Human Biology and Evolution. Bruce Weber Bruce H. Weber is Professor of Biochemistry Emeritus at California State University Fullerton as well as the Robert H. Woodworth Chair of Science and Natural Philosophy Emeritus at Bennington College. He obtained his B.S. degree in Chemistry from San Diego State University (1963) and his Ph.D. degree in Chemistry from the University of California at San Diego (1968). He was an American Cancer Society post-doctoral fellow in the laboratory of Prof. Paul Boyer (Nobel-laureate 1997) at UCLA. Weber is author of over seventy scientific publications, co-editor of three collections of essays on evolution (Evolution at a Crossroads; Entropy, Information, and Evolution; and Evolution and Learning -- all from MIT Press 1985, 1988, and 2003 respectively) and co-author (with Prof. David Depew of The University of Iowa) of Darwinism Evolving: Systems Dynamics and the Genealogy of Natural Selection (1995, MIT Press) and co-author (with Dr. John Prebble of the University of London) of Wandering in the Gardens of the Mind: Peter Mitchell and the Making of Glynn (2003 Oxford University Press). His research interests are on the application of complex systems dynamical theory to problems of the origin of life and emergent evolutionary phenomena more generally; he also publishes on the conceptual development of bioenergetics. He taught several courses on evolution at Bennington College; at California State University Fullerton he taught biochemistry as well as team-taught with Prof. James Hofmann a course on evolution and creation. He has received over six million dollars in funding from the NSF and NIH for his research and for training grants. He was also Director of the Los Angeles Basin California State Universities Consortium for Minority International Research Training funded by the National Institutes of Health for which he continues to serve as associate director. |
