The Evolution Institute

Dr. Biglan is a Senior Scientist at Oregon Research Institute, Principal Investigator of the Teacher Wellbeing Project, Director of the Center on Early Adolescence, and Co-Principal Investigator of the Promise Neighborhoods Research Consortium. He has been conducting research for the last 30 years on the prevention of adolescent problem behaviors. He has conducted numerous experimental evaluations of interventions to prevent tobacco, other drug use, high-risk sexual behavior, reading failure, and aggressive social behavior.

He and colleagues at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences published a book summarizing the epidemiology, cost, etiology, prevention, and treatment of youth with multiple problems (Biglan et al., 2004).

David C. Geary received his Ph.D. in developmental psychology in 1986 from the University of California at Riverside and from there held faculty positions at the University of Texas at El Paso and the University of Missouri, first at the Rolla campus and then in Columbia. Dr. Geary served as chair of the Department of Psychological Sciences from 2002 to 2005, as the University of Missouri’s Middlebush Professor of Psychological Sciences from 2000 to 2003, and is now a Curators’ Professor and Thomas Jefferson Fellow. He has published more than 230 articles and chapters across a wide range of topics, including three sole-authored books; Children’s mathematical development, Male, female: The evolution of human sex differences (now in second edition), and The origin of mind: Evolution of brain, cognition, and general intelligence as well as one co-authored book, Sex differences: Summarizing more than a century of scientific research. He served as a member of the President’s National (U.S.) Mathematics Advisory Panel and Chaired the Learning Processes subcommittee, is a recipient of a MERIT award from the National Institutes of Health, and was appointed by President G. W. Bush to the National Board of Directors for the Institute for Education Sciences, among other activities and distinctions.

Daniel B. Berch, Ph.D., is Professor of Educational Psychology and Applied Developmental Science at the University of Virginia’s Curry School of Education. He has authored assorted articles and book chapters on children’s numerical cognition and mathematical learning disabilities, has co-edited a special issue of Learning and Individual Differences on the topic of math difficulties and disabilities, and is senior editor of the book, Why is Math So Hard For Some Children? The Nature and Origins of Mathematical Learning Difficulties and Disabilities. For the past several years, Dr. Berch has been working on the implications of evolutionary theory for educational research and practice, publishing a book chapter on instructing evolved minds and giving an invited talk on the emerging field of “EvoEdu” at The Evolution Institute’s 2008 workshop on childhood education. Among other honors, he has received the NIH Award of Merit, was elected Fellow of the American Psychological Association’s Division of Experimental Psychology, and served as an ex officio member of the U.S. Department of Education’s National Mathematics Advisory Panel.

Bruce J. Ellis, Ph.D., is Professor of Family Studies and Human Development and the John & Doris Norton Endowed Chair in Fathers, Parenting, and Families at the University of Arizona. Dr. Ellis was originally trained as a canonical evolutionary psychologist in David Buss’ laboratory at the University of Michigan, where he studied adult sexual and romantic relationships. Developmental processes were largely taken for granted in this context. Dr. Ellis became dissatisfied with this approach, undertook three years of postdoctoral training in developmental psychopathology at Vanderbilt University, and shifted from studying adult behavior to developmental processes and mechanisms. His theoretical writings and empirical work seek to integrate evolutionary and developmental perspectives on the role of family environments in regulating child stress reactivity, pubertal development, and adolescent sexual behavior. He is particularly interested in mapping key dimensions of the environment that children’s brains detect and respond to, how these dimensions become embedded in the physiological parameters—set points and reactivity patterns—of stress response systems, and the role of different stress response profiles in mediating and moderating the development of life history strategies (e.g., timing sexual maturation, intrasexual competitive behaviors and risk-taking, patterns of mating and parenting). Dr. Ellis’ work has been recognized by major awards from the American Psychological Association, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and the John F. Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development. Dr. Ellis leads the Frances McClelland Institute initiative on Fathers, Parenting, and Families at the University of Arizona.

Dennis D. Embry, Ph.D., is the CEO/president of PAXIS Institute in Tucson, Arizona; co-investigator at the National Center on Early Adolescence in Oregon, and co-investigator at the Center on Prevention and Early Intervention at Johns Hopkins University. His work on prevention of health, safety, substance abuse, violence and mental illness among children has been featured in national media such as the Today Show, Good Morning America, Life Magazine, People Magazine, the New York Times, the LA Times, the Associated Press and others. He has been a policy and program consultant for very diverse organizations on child and family issues, from Sesame Street to the Pentagon, from state governments to foreign governments, from foundations to corporations.

Dr. Embry and PAXIS have prevention and research projects in Arizona, Maryland, Wisconsin, Kansas, Oregon, Washington, Maine, Florida, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, California, Texas, Virginia and various Native American sites. His recent prevention work focuses on low-cost evidence-based kernels and behavioral vaccines.

Dr. Hayes is Nevada Foundation Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada. An author of 35 books and over 500 scientific articles, his career has focused on an analysis of the nature of human language and cognition and the application of this to the understanding and alleviation of human suffering. Dr. Hayes has been President of Division 25 of the APA, of the American Association of Applied and Preventive Psychology, the Association for Contextual Behavioral Science, and of the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies. He was the first Secretary-Treasurer of the Association for Psychological Science, which he helped form and has served a 5 year term on the National Advisory Council for Drug Abuse in the National Institutes of Health. In 1992 he was listed by the Institute for Scientific Information as the 30th “highest impact” psychologist in the world. His work has been recognized by several awards including the Exemplary Contributions to Basic Behavioral Research and Its Applications from Division 25 of APA, the Impact of Science on Application award from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies.

Dr. Gowdy’s areas of interest include Ecological Economics, Evolutionary Economics, Welfare Theory and Policy, and Behavioral Economics. Within these sub-fields of economics his current work is in the areas of biodiversity valuation, climate change, and sustainable development in South Asia. John is past president of the U.S. Society for Ecological Economics and current President of the International Society for Ecological Economics. He has been a Fulbright scholar at the Economic University of Vienna, Leverhulme Professor at Leeds University and a visiting scholar at the Autonomous University in Barcelona, the University of Zurich, the Free University of Amsterdam, the University of Queensland and Tokushima University. He has published more than 150 academic articles and authored or co-authored 10 books. His most recent books are Microeconomic Theory Old and New: A Student’s Guide(Stanford U. Press, Spring 2010, Paradise for Sale: A Parable of Nature, co-authored with Carl McDaniel, University of California Press, and Frontiers in Ecological Economic Theory and Application, Edward Elgar Press, co-edited with Jon Erickson.

Dr. Gowdy’s contact information can be found on his Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute homepage.

Jonathan Haidt (pronounced “height”) is a social psychologist and professor in the Business and Society Program at New York University’s Stern School of Business. He studies moral psychology, with a particular interest in the moral emotions, such as moral disgust and moral elevation. He is the author of two books – The Happiness Hypothesis, and The Righteous Mind. In his current work he is examining businesses as complex multi-level organisms that have cultural and institutional features that can be more or less hospitable to ethical and unethical behavior.

Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Joseph Graves, Jr. research concerns the evolutionary genetics of postponed aging and biological concepts of race in humans, with over sixty papers and book chapters published, and had appeared in six documentary films and numerous television interviews on these general topics. He has been a Principal Investigator on grants from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and the Arizona Disease Research Commission.

His books on the biology of race are entitled: The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race at the Millennium, Rutgers University Press, 2001, 2005 and The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America, Dutton Press, 2004, 2005. A summary of Dr. Graves’s research career can be found on Wikipedia, and he is also featured in the ABC-CLIO volume on Outstanding African American scientists. In November 2007, he was featured in the CNN Anderson Cooper 360 program on Dr. James Watson.