Erich Jarvis
Assistant Professor, Neurobiology
More information at: http://www.neuro.duke.edu/faculty/jarvis/
Erich Jarvis knew the Waterman Award he'd received was prestigious, but says he “just found out this week how significant it is by going to the award ceremony where it appeared that over 300 people were present, representing high level positions, such as congressmen, presidents, and directors of different scientific agencies, board members of the NSF [National Science Foundation], etc.”
The Waterman Award is the highest award given to a young scientist by the NSF. The NSF solicits 1,100 nominations each year, and the award goes to one young scientist who has made a significant impact with his research before the age of 35 (Jarvis's current age). His plaque declares that he received the award “For his use of gene expression as a tool to map brain functional systems and to identify parts of the brain involved in perceiving, learning and producing vocal communication.” Past recipients of the Waterman Award include the present President of Harvard University (Dr. Lawrence H. Summers) and the 2001 recipient of the Nobel Prize for Physics (Dr. Eric A. Cornell).
A native New Yorker, Jarvis went to the High School of the Performing Arts as a dance major. He stayed in the city to go to Hunter College, but changed directions radically by taking a double major in mathematics and biology. Before coming to Duke, Jarvis did graduate and postdoctoral work at Rockefeller University. “I wanted to study either the origins of the universe or how the brain works,” says Jarvis. “I chose the latter. My decisions were simply based upon fascinations.” His favorite part of doing any kind of research is “having fun making discoveries.”
Jarvis is currently the principal investigator at the appropriately- named Jarvis Lab in the Neurobiology Department at Duke University Medical Center, where he works on his research with a number of post-docs, grad students, undergrads, and technicians; he also collaborates with a number of other researchers both in- and outside of the Duke community. The Jarvis lab studies the neurobiology of vocal communication, using an integrative approach that combines behavioral, anatomical, electrophysiological, and molecular biological techniques. Emphasis is placed upon the molecular pathways involved in the perception and production of learned vocalizations. Songbirds have been the main focus of the lab's research, because they belong to one of the few vertebrate groups that evolved the ability to learn vocalizations.
In an article in the journal Nature , Jarvis presented evidence that suggests his work has some significance for the human brain: distantly related vocal learning birds evolved seven very similar brain structures. He explains that “these findings implicate the evolution of similar brain pathways among vocal learning mammals, including humans. Vocal learning is the behavioral substrate for language.” Jarvis is in the process of writing a detailed treatise on the possible relationships between vocal learning birds and humans. Ultimately, Jarvis says, he wants to “decipher the language pathways in the human brain.”