Origin and Development of the Vertebrate Traits

Speaker Profiles
Per E. Ahlberg
Marianne Bronner-Fraser
Scott E. Fraser
Philip Ingham
Patrick Lemaire
Nori Satoh
Christine Thisse
Sayuri Yonei / Koji Tamura
Shin Aizawa
Ann Burke
James Hanken
Shigeru Kuratani
Yasunori Murakami
Rich Schneider
Cheryll Tickle
H. Joseph Yost
Clare V. H. Baker
Michael J. Depew
Peter Holland
Thurston Lacalli
Filippo Rijli
Yoshiko Takahashi
Hiroshi Wada
James Hanken  
James Hanken is Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology, Curator in Herpetology, and Director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. He received A.B. and Ph.D. degrees in zoology from the University of California, Berkeley. After a postdoctoral stint at Dalhousie University (with Brian Hall) in Nova Scotia, Canada, he accepted a faculty position in the Department of Environmental, Population, and Organismic Biology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He moved to Harvard in 1999, where he also is Professor of Biology in the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and a member of the Biological Sciences in Dental Medicine Program, Harvard School of Dental Medicine. His research focuses on evolutionary morphology, development, and systematics of vertebrates, especially amphibians. He is particularly interested in developmental mechanisms that underlie the complex, biphasic life history of living amphibians, and in how these mechanisms are perturbed during evolutionary diversification. His laboratory maintains active field programs in Africa, Asia, and Central and South America. He serves on the executive committee of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life and on the U.S. National Committee for the International Union of Biological Sciences, and is past-President of the International Society of Vertebrate Morphologists. James Hanken
Program