Nicholas Strausfeld

I received my Ph.D. in 1968 from University College London. After postdoctoral research enabled by the Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) foundation I joined the Max Planck Institute in Tübingen until 1975 when I became a member of the European Molecular Biology Laboratory. Since my tenured appointment in 1987 as professor at the University of Arizona I have received fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1994), the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (1996), an AvH Senior Research Prize (2001), and a Volkswagen Stiftung Professorship (2009). I was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 2002. I'm currently a Regents Professor in the UA's Neuroscience Department. My two sole-authored books are "Atlas of an Insect Brain" and "Arthropod Brains" the latter completed at the Bellagio Center in 2010. My work in insect neuroanatomy has implications for basic biomedical research and was pivotal in understanding the insect vision system. I now focus on understanding divergent evolution across the species-rich Arthropoda employing traits of brains for resolving phylogenetic relationships. In 2012 I established the novel field of paleoneuroanatomy analyzing brains in Cambrian fossils: smallness does not impede complexity; geological time maintains the morphogenetic cerebral ground pattern and its exuberant divergence.