Who knew the Tom Tom Club was into the peripheral nervous system? (And who knew I was related to a disco drummer?)
I’m a scientist and a writer at Columbia University.
Here’s the academic stuff: I study the evolution of narrative and cognition under Janet Metcalfe and Nicholas Dames. I’m especially interested in cognitive applications for natural language processing and how certain known autobiographical memory architectures can be mapped onto written narrative. Most recently, I’ve reached beyond cognition into physiology (what’s a brain without its meat engine, after all?) and have been diving headlong into sexual dimorphism in primates and how our peculiar evolution may have shaped human history. I’m also a founding member of Neuwrite, a working group of Columbia neuroscientists, scholars and writers.
Outside of academia, I write on evolution, neurobiology, and aesthetics. My essays and poems have appeared in Scientific American Mind, Science Magazine, The Best American Nonrequired Reading (Ed. Dave Eggers), The Georgia Review, and Poets Against the War, among other venues. I’m currently writing a book for Knopf called EVE: 200 Million Years of the Female Body. The book is on the evolution of the female Homo sapiens and how it’s driving new science around women’s bodies today, including some of my own work here at Columbia and in collaboration at Harvard.
(The photo above, by Stefano Unterthine, could easily be a self-portrait... macaques always looks like they’re up to something, don’t they? I generally aim to be up to something...)