Speakers for this event

• Aniruddh (Ani) Patel

  Aniruddh (Ani) Patel

  Aniruddh (Ani) Patel is a Professor of Psychology at Tufts University, where he studies the cognitive, neural, and evolutionary foundations of musicality.  His areas of emphasis include music-language relations (the topic of his 2008 book, Music, Language, and the Brain, Oxford Univ. Press), rhythmic processing, and cross-species studies of music cognition.  He and his colleagues have shown that parrots share the otherwise uniquely-human tendency to spontaneously move in synchrony with the beat of music, which offers clues to the evolutionary basis of this ability. Dr. Patel is a Fellow in the Brain, Mind, and Consciousness program in the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and is the writer and presenter of the “Music and the Brain” lecture series for The Great Courses. Recently Renée Fleming invited him to contribute a chapter on musicality, evolution, and animal responses to music to her 2024 book Music and the Mind: Harnessing The Arts for Health and Wellness, to be published on April 9.

• Dr. Diana Reiss

  Dr. Diana Reiss

  Dr. Diana Reiss is a marine mammal scientist, cognitive psychologist and a  Professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College. She is the  Director of the Animal Behavior and Conservation MA Program at Hunter  College and on the faculty of The Graduate Center of the City College of  New York. Her research focuses on dolphin cognition and communication  and the evolution of intelligence. She pioneered the use of an interactive  underwater keyboard system with dolphins to provide them with degrees of  choice and control, to investigate their vocal learning and communicative abilities, and to gain insights for decoding their own forms of communication.  She and her colleagues conducted studies demonstrating that dolphins and  elephants share our ability for mirror self- recognition. Reiss was director of  dolphin cognitive research programs at Marine World, Africa USA, New  York Aquarium of the Wildlife Conservation Society, and the National  Aquarium. She served as Chair of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Animal  Enrichment Program and was a member of the AZA’s Animal Welfare Committee. She is co-founder and chair of the board of directors of the  Interspecies Internet Interspecies Internet, a think-tank to accelerate our  understanding of interspecies and intraspecies communication. Her professional efforts also include the rescue and rehabilitation of  stranded marine mammals working directly with stranded animals and as a  science advisor to the California Marine Mammal Center. Her efforts  include the rescue of Humphrey, a Humpback whale who wandered into the Bay area in1985 and captured international attention. Dr. Reiss is an  advocate for the global protection for dolphins and whales and her work  has been published in in numerous international and national journals, featured in science magazines, television programs, and newspaper articles.  In her book The Dolphin in the Mirror, released in 2011, she shares her  personal and professional experiences with what she calls “magnificent  minds in the water.”