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Bright Horizons 9 Speakers

Bermuda • May 8th — 15th, 2011

 

NANCY C. ANDREASEN M.D., PH.D.

Nancy C. Andreasen is the Andrew H. Woods Chair of Psychiatry at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine. After obtaining a Ph.D. in English literature, Dr. Andreasen became an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Iowa before turning to medicine. She obtained her M.D. in 1970 from the University of Iowa and completed her residency training there. Her research interests include multiple aspects of neuroscience and psychiatry. She has conducted studies of creativity, mood disorders, and schizophrenia. She currently applies multimodality neuroimaging tools, including structural Magnetic Resonance and functional Magnetic Resonance, to the study of normal brain development and aging and to illnesses such as schizophrenia. She leads an interdisciplinary team that includes cognitive neuroscientists, computer scientists, electrical and biomedical engineers, physicists, and physicians.

Dr. Andreasen has won numerous honors and awards, the highest of which is the President’s National Medal of Science, presented to her by President Bill Clinton in 2000 for her work in biological sciences. She received the Interbrew-Baillet Latour Heath Prize from the Belgian National Foundation for Scientific Research in 2003 for her work in neuroimaging and schizophrenia. She has received the Rhoda and Bernard Sarnat Award from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Science. She also won the Liebehonorsr prize for her research in schizophrenia. Other prizes and awards include a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship to Harvard and a Fulbright Fellowship to Oxford; Honorary Fellow of the RCSP (Canada); Member of the Institute of Medicine; Research Scientist Award from NIMH; Menninger Award for Psychiatric Research; American Psychiatric Association Prize for Research; the Adolph Meyer Award; the Sigmund Freud Award, and the Distinguished Service and Stanley Dean Awards from the American College of Psychiatrists. She is the author of more than 600 scientific and scholarly articles and fifteen books, ranging from John Donne: Conservative Revolutionary (Princeton, 1976) to Brave New Brain: Conquering Mental Illness in the Era of the Genome (Oxford, 2001). She has also authored two widely-used textbooks on psychiatry and was Editor in Chief of the American Journal of Psychiatry for 13 years. Her most recent book is The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius.

JEREMY BAILENSON, PH.D.

Dr. Jeremy Bailenson is founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford. He earned a B.A. cum laude from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Northwestern University in 1999. After receiving his doctorate, he spent four years at the Research Center for Virtual Environments and Behavior at the University of California, Santa Barbara as a Post-Doctoral Fellow and then an Assistant Research Professor.

Bailenson’s main area of interest is the phenomenon of digital human representation, especially in the context of immersive virtual reality. He explores the manner in which people are able to represent themselves when the physical constraints of body and veridically-rendered behaviors are removed. Furthermore, he designs and studies collaborative virtual reality systems that allow physically remote individuals to meet in virtual space, and explores the manner in which these systems change the nature of verbal and nonverbal interaction.

His findings have been published in over 70 academic papers in the fields of communication, computer science, education, law, political science, and psychology. His work has been consistently funded by the National Science Foundation for over a decade, and he also receives grants from various Silicon Valley and international corporations. Bailenson consults regularly for government agencies including the Army, the Department of Defense, the National Research Council, and the National Institute of Health on policy issues surrounding virtual reality.

JERALD T. MILANICH, PH.D.

Dr. Jerald T. (Jerry) Milanich is contributing editor for Archaeology magazine (a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America). For many years he was Curator in Archaeology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, during which time he participated in archaeological field projects throughout the Southeast and in Haiti. His favorite excavations were on the Georgia Sea Islands (always near a good fishing spot), a far cry from New York City and the northern Catskill Mountains where he presently lives.

Dr. Milanich has lectured throughout the Americas, including a decade-long affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Associate Lecture and Seminar Program. Since 1993 he has been listed in Who’s Who in America. Recent awards include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Florida Archaeological Council and the Florida Academy of Sciences Medalist Award as outstanding Florida scientist. He has been President of the Society of Professional Archeologists, an Executive Board member of the Society for American Archaeology, and he has been appointed to numerous review panels for the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2010 he was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Milanich is the author of more than twenty books describing the Indian societies of the Americas and their interactions with Europeans during the colonial and post-colonial periods, including: Laboring in the Fields of the Lord, Spanish Missions and Southeastern Indians; Florida’s Indians From Ancient Times to the Present; Florida Indians and the Invasion from Europe; and Archaeology of Precolumbian Florida. Recent research has resulted in two books on the nineteenth century: Frolicking Bears, Wet Vultures, And Other Oddities: A New York City Journalist in Nineteenth-Century Florida and A Remarkable Curiosity: Dispatches from a New York City Journalist’s 1873 Railroad Trip across the American West. He also has been editor for more than sixty other books for the University Press of Florida.

His latest book, which is in press, relates the adventures of two New York City financiers in the interior of South Florida. That book is the basis for one of his Bright Horizons lectures.

MICHAEL SHERMER, PH.D.

Dr. Michael Shermer is the Founding Publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com), the Executive Director of the Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American, the host of the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, and Adjunct Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University.

Dr. Shermer’s latest book is The Mind of the Market, on evolutionary economics. His last book was Why Darwin Matters: Evolution and the Case Against Intelligent Design, and he is the author of Science Friction: Where the Known Meets the Unknown, about how the mind works and how thinking goes wrong. His book The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Gossip, Share Care, and Follow the Golden Rule, is on the evolutionary origins of morality and how to be good without God. He wrote a biography, In Darwin’s Shadow, about the life and science of the co-discoverer of natural selection, Alfred Russel Wallace. He also wrote The Borderlands of Science, about the fuzzy land between science and pseudoscience, and Denying History, on Holocaust denial and other forms of pseudohistory. His book How We Believe: Science, Skepticism, and the Search for God, presents his theory on the origins of religion and why people believe in God. He is also the author of Why People Believe Weird Things on pseudoscience, superstitions, and other confusions of our time.

Dr. Shermer received his B.A. in psychology from Pepperdine University, M.A. in experimental psychology from California State University, Fullerton, and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Claremont Graduate University (1991). He was a college professor for 20 years (1979–1998), teaching psychology, evolution, and the history of science at Occidental College (1989–1998), California State University Los Angeles, and Glendale College. Since his creation of the Skeptics Society, Skeptic magazine, and the Skeptics Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, he has appeared on such shows as The Colbert Report, 20/20, Dateline, Charlie Rose, Larry King Live, Tom Snyder, Donahue, Oprah, Lezza, Unsolved Mysteries (but, proudly, never Jerry Springer!), and other shows as a skeptic of weird and extraordinary claims, as well as interviews in countless documentaries aired on PBS, A&E, Discovery, The History Channel, The Science Channel, and The Learning Channel. Shermer was the co-host and co-producer of the 13-hour Family Channel television series, Exploring the Unknown.

MAX TEGMARK, PH.D.

Max Tegmark, Ph.D. is a Professor of Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tegmark’s research has focused on cosmology theory and phenomenology, but has also included diverse topics such as interpretations of quantum mechanics, predictions of inflation, and parallel universes.

A native Swede, from his initial American foray in Berkeley, California. Dr. Tegmark has tended eastward. Max Tegmark earned a B.A. in Economics from the Stockholm School of Economics, and received a B.Sc. in Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm. He earned an M.A. Physics, and subsequently a Ph.D. in Physics, from the University of California, Berkeley. Tegmark then served as a research associate with the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik in Munich. In 1996 he headed back to the U.S. as a Hubble Fellow and member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Dr. Tegmark next sampled the environs of the City of Brotherly Love as an Assistant Professor of Physics at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received tenure in 2003. Forsaking the delights of Philadelphia, he moved to MIT in September 2004.

Dr. Tegmark has received numerous awards for his research, including a Packard Fellowship (2001–06), Cottrell Scholar Award (2002–07), and an NSF Career grant (2002–07). His work with the SDSS collaboration on galaxy clustering shared the first prize in Science magazine’s “Breakthrough of the Year: 2003.”

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