This is our first scheduled meetup in the big room (with the bar), which will be much nicer than the North Avenue Room. So come and show Manuels that we can pull in a crowd to merit this space. We will be charging $4 instead of the usual $2, but it is well worth it for the room.

Dr. Pruess will speak to us about the evolutionary connections between ourselves and other members of our extended primate family (chimpanzees & monkeys). He will share recent studies from neuroimaging, genomics, and histology of the brain.

Todd Preuss is associate research professor, Division of Neuroscience at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center, and associate professor of pathology at Emory University School of Medicine. He received his BA in psychology from Haverford College and his PhD in biological anthropology from Yale University. Preuss’s laboratory carries out fundamental research on the structure and evolution of the mammalian cerebral cortex, using comparative studies of humans, chimpanzees, and other primates to identify human specializations. His laboratory identified the first known specialization of the neuronal organization in the human brain and has pioneered studies of human specializations of gene expression in the brain. Preuss is a three-time Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences. The work of the Preuss laboratory was the subject of a March 2007 feature story in the journal Science.

Read a recent article about Dr. Pruess's recearch:
Why can't chimps speak? Study links evolution of single gene to human capacity for language