Dr. Cat Bohannon is a researcher and author with a Ph.D. from Columbia University in the evolution of narrative and cognition. Her essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American, Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Georgia Review, The Story Collider, and Poets Against the War. She is the author of Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution. More»
Dr. Dale Greenwalt is Research Associate in the laboratory of Dr. Conrad Labandeira, curator of fossil arthropods, in the Paleobiology Department at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. His work centers on description of the insect fauna of the Coal Creek Member of the Middle Eocene Kishenehn Formation in northwestern Montana. He is also interested in defining the biological and geological processes that resulted in the preservation of these insects and the original biomolecular components that are found in the fossils of the Kishenehn Formation. He is the author of Remnants of Ancient Life: The New Science of Old Fossils. More»
Dr. Eduardo Fernandez-Duque is Professor of Anthropology at the School of the Environment at Yale University. He is a biological anthropologist with a general interest in understanding the evolution and maintenance of social systems. His main research interest is to examine the mechanisms that maintain pair-living, sexual monogamy and biparental care and the role that sexual selection may have had in the evolution of them. He is also motivated to study living primates as an approach to understanding the evolution of human behavior. He is particularly interested in male-female relationships, pair bonding and paternal care in humans and non-human primates. More»
Dr. Darcia Narvaez is a Professor of Psychology Emerita at the University of Notre Dame. She has written extensively on issues of character and moral development. Dr. Narvaez’ research explores questions of species-typical and species-atypical development in terms of wellbeing, morality, and sustainable wisdom. She examines how early life experience (the evolved nest) influences moral functioning and wellbeing. More»
Dr. Gregory Radick is Professor of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. He has held fellowships from the British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, and served as President of the British Society for the History of Science (2014‒16) and the International Society for the History, Philosophy, and Social Studies of Biology (2019‒21). He writes and lectures frequently for general audiences, and has appeared on BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time and in the PBS/National Geographic television series Genius with Stephen Hawking. In 2022 he was appointed to the Board of Trustees of the Science Museum Group. He is the author of several books, including Disputed Inheritance: The Battle over Mendel and the Future of Biology. More»
Dr. Paco Calvo is a Professor at the University of Murcia in Spain, where he leads the Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab), focusing on the study of minimal cognition in plants. Dr. Calvo’s interdisciplinary work combines insights from biology, philosophy, and cognitive science to explore the fascinating world of plant behavior, decision-making, and problem-solving. By investigating the complex interactions and adaptive responses exhibited by plants, Dr. Calvo has significantly contributed to our understanding of cognition beyond the animal kingdom, challenging conventional perspectives on intelligence and mental capacities. He is the author of Planta Sapiens: The New Science of Plant Intelligence. More»
Dr. Philip Ball is a freelance science writer, with a BA in Chemistry from the University of Oxford and a PhD in Physics from the University of Bristol. He was an editor at Nature for over 20 years. He is the author of many popular books on science, including The Book of Minds: How to Understand Ourselves and Other Beings, from Animals to AI to Aliens. More»
Dr. Randall Beer is Professor of Cognitive Science and Informatics at Indiana University Bloomington. Dr. Beer's primary research interest is in understanding how coordinated behavior arises from the dynamical interaction of an animal's nervous system, its body and its environment. Toward this end, he works on the evolution and analysis of dynamical "nervous systems" for model agents, neuromechanical modeling of animals, biologically-inspired robotics, and dynamical systems approaches to behavior and cognition. More generally, he is interested in computational and theoretical biology, including models of metabolism, gene regulation and development. More»
Dr. Amalia Bastos is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Social & Cognitive Origins Group at Johns Hopkins University. She is interested in how evolutionary pressures have shaped the minds of different species, and which cognitive mechanisms animals employ while interacting with the world around them. Her current work focuses on how chimpanzees perceive third-party social interactions through eye-tracking technology, alongside research on dog cognition. More»
Dr. Jessica Nowicki is a Research Scientist at the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute at Stanford University. She is interested in the mechanistic basis of prosocial behavior in early vertebrates. She uses poison frogs, which display considerable variation in sociality among closely related species, for comparatively identifying neural correlates of pair bonding within the clade. In order to verify the functional involvement of these correlates, she then couples this with functional tests on the strongly pair bonding species, Ranitomeya imitator. More»
