Gruter Institute Research Fellows
Gruter Institute Research Fellowships are awarded to individuals who actively participate in Institute’s activities. Scholars and scientists from a broad range of academic disciplines including law, ethology, anthropology, neuroscience, political science, economics, and medicine, as well as individuals of distinction not employed by the academe have received fellowships. Research Fellows participate in the Institute’s teaching activities and research related to the Institute’s interests. In addition, Research Fellows are responsible for numerous Institute-related publications dealing with law, behavior, economics, evolution, politics, and neuroscience.
Abigail A. Baird is a Professor of Psychology at Vassar College. She earned her undergraduate degree from Vassar College and both a M.A. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. Following completion of her Ph.D. She was awarded a Post-Doctoral Fellowship at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, at Dartmouth College. Her numerous articles and presentations have covered topics such as adolescent brain development, cognitive regulation of emotion, juvenile justice, and manifestations of racial bias in mind brain and behavior.Abigail’s research has received awards from Harvard University, the Society for Research on Psychopathology, and in 2008 the Association for Psychological Science named Abigail a “Rising Star in Psychological Science”. Her research has also led her to be elected to several scientific societies including the International Society for Behavioral Neuroscience and the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research. Abigail has been repeatedly recognized for her excellence in teaching. In 2000 she received Harvard’s George Goethals Teaching Prize, and in 2004 was awarded the Class of 1962 Excellence in Teaching Fellowship by Dartmouth College. Her professional accomplishments also include serving as secretary of the Association for Psychological Science, Honorary Faculty Member for the Order of Omega National Honor Society, Invited Faculty to the New York State Judicial Institute and Advisory Board member on the Campaign for Youth Justice.
Isabel Behncke Izquierdo is a Chilean primatologist who studies the social behaviour, especially play, of bonobos (pan paniscus) the other species, together with Chimpanzee, inside the genus Pan. In 2011 she was a TED Fellow and gave a talk “Evolution’s gift of play, from bonobo apes to humans”. In October 2013 she appeared on BBC Radio 4’s The Museum of Curiosity. Her hypothetical donation to this fictional museum was “a laughing tree”, a tree in which Bonobos congregated and laughed such that the tree itself seemed to laugh. She is a member of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group at the University of Oxford and the Research Center in Social Complexity at the Universidad del Desarrollo.
Carl Bergstrom is an evolutionary biologist studying the role of information in social and biological systems at scales from intracellular control of gene expression to population-wide linguistic communication. Working in close collaboration with empirical and experimental researchers, Dr. Bergstrom’s group approaches these problem using mathematical models and computer simulations. Dr. Bergstrom’s recent projects include contributions to the game theory of communication and deception, work on how immune systems avoid subversion by pathogens, and a number of more applied studies in disease evolution, including analysis of antibiotic resistant bacteria in hospital settings and models of the interaction between ecology and evolution in novel emerging pathogens such as SARS. Dr. Bergstrom received his Ph.D. in theoretical population genetics from Stanford University in 1998. After a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at Emory University, where he studied the ecology and evolution of infectious diseases, Dr. Bergstrom joined the faculty in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington in 2001.
Professor Brosnan’s research interests lie in the intersection of complex social behavior and cognition. More specifically, she is interested in mechanisms underlying cooperation, reciprocity, inequity, and other economic decisions in nonhuman primates from an evolutionary perspective. This includes, but is not limited to, questions of what decisions individuals make and how they make these decisions, how their social or ecological environments affect their decisions and interactions, and under what circumstances they can alter their behaviors contingent upon these inputs.
Robert Cooter, a pioneer in the field of law and economics, began teaching in the Department of Economics at UC Berkeley in 1975 and joined the Boalt faculty in 1980. He has been a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and a recipient of various awards and fellowships, including Guggenheim, the Jack N. Pritzker Visiting Research Professorship at Northwestern Law School, and, most recently, the Max Planck Research Prize. He was an Olin visiting professor at the University of Virginia Law School and lectured at the University of Cologne in 1989. He is coeditor of the Review of Law and Economics. He is one of the founders of the American Law and Economics Association and served from 1994 to 1995 as its president. In 1999 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also one of te founders of the Latin American Law and Economics Association, and also the Comparative Law and Economics Forum. Cooter has published a wide variety of articles on private law, constitutional law and economics, and law and economic development. Recent publications include the third edition of the leading textbook Law and Economics (with Ulen, 1999), also translated into Spanish, Italian, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. He has also authored “Commodifying Liability” in The Fall and Rise of Freedom of Contract (1999), “Law from Order: Economic Development and the Jurisprudence of Social Norms” in A Not-so-Dismal Science: A Broader, Brighter Approach to Economies and Societies (1999), “Punitive Damages” in Philosophy of Law: An Encyclopedia (1999), and “Does Risk to Oneself Increase the Care Owed to Others? Law and Economics in Conflict” in the Journal of Legal Studies (with Porat, 2000). “
Fran B.M. de Waal is C.H. Candler Professor of Primate Behavior, Psychology Department, Emory University, and Director of the Living Links Center at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center. Professor de Waal has spent the major part of his academic career studying primates. His current research focuses on the social behavior and cognition of monkeys and apes with special emphasis on behavioral economics and cultural learning. He also works on the evolution of morality and proscocial tendencies, such as empathy. Representative publications are his many books, such as Chimpanzee Politics (1982), Primates & Philosophers (2006), and The Age of Empathy(2009). Technical articles include those on inequity aversion, consolation behavior, and reciprocity in food sharing.”
Helen Fisher, PhD is a Biological Anthropologist, Research Professor and member of the Center for Human Evolutionary Studies in the Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University and Chief Scientific Advisor to the Internet dating site, Chemistry.com, a division of Matc.com. She has conducted extensive research and written five books on the evolution and future of human sex, love, marriage, gender differences in the brain and how your personality type shapes who you are and who you love. Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love (Henry Holt/2004) discusses her team research project using fMRI brain scanning to investigate the brain circuitry of romantic love and the effect of this primary mating drive on contemporary patterns of social, medical and criminal behavior. The First Sex: The Natural Talents of Women and How They are Changing the World (Random House /1999; Ballantine/2000) discusses gender differences in the brain and behavior and the impact of WORKING women on 21st century business, sex and family life. Anatomy of Love: The Natural History of Monogamy, Adultery and Divorce (W.W. Norton/1992;Fawcett/1994) examines divorce in 62 societies, adultery in 42 cultures and patterns of monogamy and desertion in birds and mammals to offer a theory for the evolution of serial marriage and the future of human family life. The Sex Contract: The Evolution of Human Behavior (William Morrow/l982; Quill/l983) discussed the evolution of human marriage. Dr. Fisher has been on the national lecture circuit since l983 discussing the evolution of human sexuality, romantic love, marriage and divorce, gender differences in the brain and behavior, and the future of men, women, business, sex and family life. Her publications include articles in The Journal of Comparative Neurology, The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, Journal of Forensic Sciences, Neuroendocrinology Letters, Archives of Sexual Behavior, The Journal of NIH Research, The American Journal of Physical Anthropology, and Human Nature and books published by Yale University Press, MIT Press, Smithsonian Press, Cambridge University Press, and Columbia University Press. For her work in communicating anthropology to the lay public, Helen received the American Anthropological Association’s “Distinguished Service Award” in l985.
Robert H. Frank is the Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management and Professor of Economics at Cornell’s Johnson Graduate School of Management, and the co-director of the Paduano Seminar in Law, Ethics, and Markets at NYU’s Stern School. His “Economic View” column appears monthly in The New York Times. He received his B.S. in mathematics from Georgia Tech in 1966, then taught math and science for two years as a Peace Corps Volunteer in rural Nepal. He received his M.A. in statistics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1971 and his Ph.D. in economics in 1972, also from U.C. Berkeley. During leaves of absence from Cornell, he was chief economist for the Civil Aeronautics Board from 1978 to 1980, a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 1992-93, and the Professor of American Civilization at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 2000-2001. Professor Frank’s books, which include Choosing the Right Pond, Passions Within Reason, Microeconomics and Behavior, Principles of Economics (with Ben Bernanke), Luxury Fever, [and] What Price the Moral High Ground?, Falling Behind, The Economic Naturalist, and The Economic Naturalist’s Field Guide, have been translated into 18 languages. The Winner-Take-All Society, co-authored with Philip Cook, received a Critic’s Choice Award, was named a Notable Book of the Year by The New York Times, and was included in Business Week’s list of the ten best books of 1995. He is a co-recipient of the 2004 Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought. He was awarded the Johnson School’s Stephen Russell Distinguished teaching award in 2004 and its Apple Distinguished Teaching Award in 2005.
Dorothy J. Glancy is Professor of Law at Santa Clara University School of Law. A graduate of Wellesley College (B.A. in English and Intellectual History) and Harvard Law School (J.D.), Professor Glancy teaches courses in property, intellectual property, copyright law, trademark law, land use and administrative law. Before entering academia, Professor Glancy practiced law in Washington, D.C. and was counsel to the United States Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights during the time of the Watergate investigations. She also served in the Office of General Counsel of the United States Department of Agriculture. Professor Glancy has been chair of the Section on Defamation and Privacy, as well as the Sections on Environmental Law and Property of the Association of American Law Schools. She was an Adviser to the Executive Committee of the Environmental Law Section of the State Bar of California and a member of the Council of the American Bar Association Section of Natural Resources, Energy and Environmental Law and Past-Chair of the Section’s Ethics Committee. A life member of the American Law Institute, Professor Glancy was an adviser to the Restatement of Property: Servitudes. She currently serves on the Court Technology Advisory Committee to the State of California Judicial Council. For more than a decade, Professor Glancy has been an active participant in the work of the Gruter Institute for Law and Behavioral Research. A specialist on the law of privacy and intelligent transportation systems, she directed a study of the impact of intelligent transportation systems on privacy under a grant from the Federal Highway Administration and published a series of articles and research reports on the subject. She has been a consultant with regard to privacy issues related to the Vehicle Infrastructure Integration (VII) project under development by the US Department of Transportation, vehicle manufacturers and state transportation authorities. Her publications cover a wide range of topics, including the judicial work of Justice William O. Douglas, various aspects of property law, as well as historic preservation, co-ownership and intellectual property.
Oliver R. Goodenough is Professor at the Vermont Law School and a Faculty Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He is also an adjunct professor of engineering at Dartmouth’s Thayer School, and, from 1999-2000, he was a Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Zoology at Cambridge University. He is co-director, with Monika Cheney of the Gruter Institute, of the Education and Outreach Program of the Law and Neuroscience Project. His current areas of research include applications of neuroscience and evolutionary biology to problems of economic law, including contracts, property and intellectual property, the neuroscience of law and moral judgment, the evolution of legal institutions and other cultural elements, and evolutionary theory. At the Berkman Center Law Lab, which he also co-directs, his projects include creating new digital business institutions and “micro law” applications to help law better support the activities of innovators and entrepreneurs.
His writings in areas related to law, brain and behavior include: Law, Mind and Brain, Michael Freeman and Oliver R. Goodenough, eds. (London, Ashgate, 2009), which includes his co-authored chapter “Why Do Good People Steal Intellectual Property? (with Gregory Decker); “Preface: Is Free Enterprise Values in Action?” (with Monika Gruter Cheney) and Values, Mechanism Design, and Fairness, both in Paul J. Zak ed., Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2008); Individual differences in moral judgment competence influence neural correlates of socio-normative judgments. With Prehn K, Wartenburger I, Mériau K, Scheibe C, Goodenough OR, Villringer A, van der Meer E, and Heekeren HR, Social cognitive and affective neuroscience 3(1):33-46, (2008); Cultural Replication Theory in Law: Proximate Mechanisms Make a Difference, Vermont Law Review, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 989-1005 (2006); Can Cognitive Neuroscience Make Psychology a Foundational Discipline for the Study of Law? in Belinda Brooks-Gordon and Michael Freeman, eds., Law and Psychology, Current Legal Issues Vol. 9 (Oxford, Oxford University Press. 2006); Law and the Brain, with Semir Zeki (eds.), and co-author of 3 chapters (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006); A Neuroscientific Approach to Normative Judgment in Law and Justice, (with Kristin Prehn) Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 359, No. 1451, P. 1709-1726 (2004); Responsibility and Punishment – Whose Mind? A Response, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Biological Sciences, Vol. 359, No. 1451, P. 1805-1809 (2004); The Future of Intellectual Property: Broadening the Sense of Ought, European Intellectual Property Review , Vol. 24, No. 6, P. 291-293. (2002); Law and the Biology of Commitment, in Randolph Nesse, ed., Evolution and the Capacity for Commitment (Russel Sage, 2002); Mapping Cortical Areas Associated with Legal Reasoning and Moral Intuition, 41 Jurimetrics J. Vol. 41, P. 429-442 (2001); Law and the Architecture of Human Intelligence, in Haft, Fritjof et al. eds., Bausteine zu einer Verhaltungstheorie des Rechts (Nomos, 2001); The Nature of Business: Bringing the Insights of Biologically Informed Behavioral Science to Business and the Law, in Frolik, Lawrence A, ed., Law and Evolutionary Biology: Selected Essays in Honor of Margaret Gruter on Her 80th Birthday, (Portola Valley CA, Gruter Institute, 1999); Information Replication in Culture: Three Modes for the Transmission of Culture Elements Through Observed Action, Proceedings of the AISBí99 Symposium on Imitation in Animals and Artifacts (Sussex, The Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behavior, 1999); Biology, Behavior, and Criminal Law: Seeking a Responsible Approach to an Inevitable Interchange, Vermont Law Review, Vol.22, No. 2, P. 263 (1997); Mind Viruses: Culture, Evolution and the Puzzle of Altruism, Social Science Information, Vol. 34, No. 2, P. 287 (1995); and The ‘St Jude’ mind virus, with Richard Dawkins, Nature, Vol. 371, No. 6492, P. 23, (September 1, 1994).
His work on other legal and business subjects includes: This Business of Television, 3rd Ed., with Howard Blumenthal (Billboard Books, New York, 2006) and Retheorizing Privacy and Publicity, Intellectual Property Quarterly, Launch Issue, P. 37 (1997).
Owen D. Jones holds a joint appointment as Professor of Law & Professor of Biological Sciences at Vanderbilt University. He is a leading scholar on issues at the intersection of law and behavioral biology. Published in scientific as well as legal venues, he is the author of several dozen articles and book chapters. His current empirical research uses brain-imaging (fMRI), primatology and behavioral economics to learn more about how the brain’s varied operations affect behaviors relevant to law. Most recently, he co-discovered with colleagues at Vanderbilt the brain activity underlying decisions of whether to punish someone and, if so, how much. Professor Jones holds a joint appointment in the Department of Biological Sciences. He is director and former president of the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law (S.E.A.L.), an international interdisciplinary scholarly organization, whose members focus on issues at the intersection of law, biology and behavior. Before joining the legal academy, Professor Jones clerked for Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, and practiced law with the D.C. law firm Covington & Burling. He came to Vanderbilt from Arizona State University, where he was Willard H. Pedrick Distinguished Research Scholar, Professor of Law, Professor of Biology and Faculty Fellow of the Center for the Study of Law, Science, and Technology. He is a graduate of Amherst College and Yale Law School. In 2004, the Gruter Institute awarded Jones the Bene Merenti Award for Outstanding Achievements in Law and Behavioral Research. In 2007, Professor Jones was appointed co-director of the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Decision Making, which is exploring the relevance of neuroscience to criminal law.
Kevin A. McCabe is professor of Economics and Law at George Mason University , and he serves as director of the Behavioral and Neuroeconomics Laboratory at the Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science. Professor McCabe graduated from Villanova University with a B.S. in economics, and the University of Pennsylvania with a Ph.D. in economics. His current service includes: distinguished research fellow at the International Foundation for Research in Experimental Economics, and research fellow at the Gruter Institute for the study of Biology and the Law. Past service includes section editor of the Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science, Macmillan, and consultant to USAID on training in economics and management at the Warsaw School 0f Economics in Poland . Professor McCabe research is funded in part by the National Science Foundation through his current grants NSF- SES: 0129744, “Brain Function and Economic Decision Making,” and NSF-(Number Pending), “Enhancing Human Economic Performance.” His research interests are in the experimental study of economic cognition at the level of the embodied brain, the mind, the organization, the institution, and the market. A recent selection of his publications includes: Houser, D., M. Keane, and K. McCabe, “Behavior in a Dynamic Decision Problem: An Analysis of Experimental Evidence Using a Bayesian Type Classification Algorithm,” forthcoming Econometrica. Deck, C., K. McCabe, and D. Porter “ Why Stable Money Hyperinflates: Results from an Experimental Economy,” forthcoming Journal of Economic Behavior and Organizations. Durham Y., K. McCabe, M. Olson, S. Rassenti, and V. Smith “Oligopoly Competition in Fixed Cost Environments,” International Journal of Industrial Organization, forthcoming. Dickhaut, J. K. McCabe, J. Nagode, K. Smith and J. Pardo, “The role of context in choice:The effect of different comparison gambles on risky behavior,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (100)2003, 3536-3541. McCabe, K., M. Rigdon, and V. Smith, “Positive Reciprocity and Intentions in Trust Games,” Journal of Economic Behavior and Organizations , (52) 2003, 267-275. Smith, K., J. Dickhaut, K. McCabe, and J. Pardo, “Neuronal Substrates for Choice Under Ambiguity, Risk, Certainty, Gains, and Losses,” Management Science , (48)2002, 711-718. Gunnthursdottir, A., K. McCabe, and Vernon Smith, “Using the Machiavellian Instrument to Predict Trustworthiness in a Bargaining Game,” Journal of Economic Psychology, (23)2002, 49-66. McCabe, K., D. Houser, L. Ryan, V. Smith, and T. Trouard, “A Functional Imaging Study of Cooperation in Two-Person Reciprocal Exchange,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, (98)2001, 11832-11835. Kurzban, R. K. McCabe, V. Smith, and B. Wilson, “Incremental Commitment and Reciprocity in a Real Time Public Goods Game,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, (27)2001, 1662-1673.
Erin O’Hara O’Connor is currently a Professor of Law at Vanderbilt University. She has also taught at the University of Chicago, Georgetown University, Northwestern University, George Mason University, and Clemson University. Much of her work focuses on interpersonal trust and the influence that law has on the creation, erosion and restoration of interpersonal trust in relationships. Professor O’Hara is also a scholar of contract theory and has written extensively on how contract clauses are used by people and firms to choose the laws they prefer to govern their relationships. She teaches Contracts, Conflicts of Laws, Choosing Legal Regimes, Law and Positive Political Theory, and Public Choice and Public Law. With Larry Ribstein, Professor O’Hara is co-author of the THE LAW MARKET, published by Oxford University Press in 2009.
Jeffrey Stake is the Robert A. Lucas Chair of Law at Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington. He earned his B.A. In 1975 from the University of Illinois and his J.D. In 1981 from Georgetown University Law Center. He clerked for the Honorable Oscar H. Davis, U.S. Court of Claims, Washington, D.C. during 1981-82 and was an Associate at Covington & Burling, Washington, D.C., during 1982-85. Professor Stake has taught Property, Wills and Trusts, and Land-Use Controls at Indiana University since 1985. He was Indiana University Maurer School of Law’s first teacher to receive both the Leon Wallace Teaching Award and the IU Trustees Teaching Award. He was the past President and founding Vice-President of the Society for Evolutionary Analysis in Law. Professor Stake’s interdisciplinary approach brings principles of economics, psychology, and evolution to bear on legal issues ranging from alimony and adverse possession to the Rule against Perpetuities. In addition, he has applied evolution to the First Amendment’s protection of free speech and empirical economic analysis to careers of IU law graduates and to U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of law schools. A number of his papers are available for free on SSRN. He has published in leading legal periodicals and has presented papers at scholarly conferences throughout the United States and Europe, and has lectured at Paris II and at the Max Planck Institute in Jena Germany.
Charles R. Taylor joined the Office of Financial Research in the U.S. Treasury as Executive Fellow in November 2015. There his research into financial stability has focused on capital policy for banks, the diversity of the financial system and financial innovation. Diversity is part of a larger theme in his research of applying evolutionary theory to the study of financial stability. Related topics of interest include: trends in regulatory complexity; whether the financial system is self-critical in the sense of having an internal tendency towards unstable states; culture in financial institutions and at supervisory agencies; and the complexity of financial institutions and in the relationships between them. For the previous four years he was Deputy Comptroller of the Currency for Capital and Regulatory Policy. In that capacity, he represented the Comptroller on the Basel Committee where he chaired the Supervision and Implementation Group. Before that, he was Director of the bipartisan Pew Financial Reform Project which advocated for financial reform in the run-up to the Dodd-Frank Act and, earlier in his career, he was Executive Director of the Group of Thirty where he co-wrote several papers on financial policy, including the path-breaking study “Derivatives: Practices and Principles”. His career included stints in consulting and on Wall Street. He has written and spoken widely on public policy issues. He has degrees from Cambridge, Oxford and Wharton in mathematics, economics and business respectively. He is a fellow of the Wharton Financial Institutions Center and a member of the Risk Management Association.
Lionel Tiger is Darwin Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University . Professor Tiger has served as a consultant on terrorism to the Science Advisory Board to the Secretary of the Air Force, and on adapting insights about “human nature” to the program of the Director of Net Assessment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. His current areas of research include the impact of ambient social science notions of human sexuality and sex roles on social policy and political theory, role of biogenic factors in the formation of macrosocial patterns in industrial societies, the impact of the primordial on modern warfare, and shifts in relative power (productive and reproductive) among males and females in industrial societies. Representative publications: The Apes of New York, Cybereditions, New Zealand, 2003; The Decline of Males, St. Martins Press, 2000; Men in Groups (Editions 1, 2 and 3). New York. Random House. 1969, 1987, 2004; The Imperial Animal with Robin Fox (Editions 1, 2, and 3). New York. Holt Rinehart. 1971, 1977 (Editions 1 and 2). New York. Transaction. 1997 (Edition 3); (with Joseph Shepher) Women in the Kibbutz. New York . Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich. 1975; Optimism: The Biology of Hope. Simon and Shuster, New York; Secker a Warburg London, 1979; reissued with new introduction, Kodansha, New York, 1995, new Forward by LT, Introduction by Frederick Turner; The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System. New York. Harper and Row. 1987. With Michael T. McGuire, Dr. Tiger is co-author of the forthcoming book GOD’S BRAIN, from Prometheus Publishers, which is set to be released in March 2010.
Andrew W. Torrance joined the KU (University of Kansas) Law faculty in 2005 and, in 2009, was named a Docking Faculty Scholar, a university-wide program honoring faculty members who have distinguished themselves in their early careers. Torrance was a visiting professor of law at the University of Washington School of Law in 2011, and a visiting scholar at the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2012. He was also a 2009-10 Fellow in Law, Innovation and Growth at the Searle Center at Northwestern University Law School. In August of 2010, Torrance was invited by Google Inc. to give a Google TechTalk at Google’s main Mountain View campus in California; Google posted his entire presentation, “The Patent Game: Experiments in the Cathedral of Law,” on its YouTube Google TechTalk channel. Torrance is often featured by prominent news outlets, including NPR, Forbes, the Seattle Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. He received his Ph.D. in biology from Harvard University in 1997 and is a 2000 graduate of Harvard Law School. He earned his Bachelor of Science from Queen’s University in Canada. In 2003, he was named the Hrdy Visiting Professor of Conservation Biology at Harvard University and taught Biodiversity: Science, Policy, and Law at Harvard University from 1999 until his arrival at KU.
Torrance practiced biotechnology patent law at Fish and Richardson PC, the world’s largest intellectual property law firm, after working as a summer associate at both Morrison & Foerster LLC and Fish & Richardson P.C. Next, he served as inhouse patent counsel at Inverness Medical Innovations, a global biotechnology company with headquarters in Boston, and helped start Stirling Medical Innovations, a cardiac diagnostics biotechnology company based in Scotland. He has presented his research across the United States, as well as in Canada, Finland, Scotland, England, France and Germany. His articles have been published in journals such as the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, the Georgetown International Environmental Law Review, and the Washington University Journal of Law and Policy.
Douglas Yarn is Executive Director of the Consortium on Negotiation and Conflict Resolution and Professor of Law at Georgia State University College of Law where he teaches conflict resolution and ethics. An experienced, litigator, mediator, facilitator, and arbitrator, Professor Yarn served as in- house attorney, mediator, and trainer for the American Arbitration Association from 1987- 1994. He has trained mediators and arbitrators nationwide and designed conflict management systems for private and public entities, domestic and international. He is a Salzburg Fellow specializing in international environmental dispute resolution and has consulted for the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. His publications include, The Dictionary of Conflict Resolution (Jossey- Bass 1999), Alternative Dispute Resolution: Practice and Procedure in Georgia (3rd ed. Thomson/West 2006), Alternative Dispute Resolution: Practice and Procedure in North Carolina (Harrison 1998), and numerous book chapters and articles ranging from the social utility of dueling codes and the history of English arbitrement to apology and ADR ethics. Professor Yarn’s current research interests focus primarily on the behavioral biology of conflict and reconciliation incorporating ethology, ethnography, game theory, network tools, and complex adaptive systems theory. His degrees are from Duke University, University of Georgia, and Cambridge University, England.
Paul J. Zak is the founding Director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and Professor of Economics, Psychology and Business at Claremont Graduate University. Zak also serves as Professor of Neurology at Loma Linda University Medical Center, and is a Senior Researcher at UCLA. He has degrees in mathematics and economics from San Diego State University, a Ph.D. in economics from University of Pennsylvania, and post-doctoral training in neuroimaging from Harvard. Professor Zak is credited with the first published use of the term “neuroeconomics” and has been a vanguard in this new discipline. He organized and administers the first doctoral program in neuroeconomics in the world at Claremont Graduate University. Dr. Zak is a recognized expert in oxytocin. His lab discovered in 2004 that oxytocin allows us to determine who to trust. This knowledge is being used to understand the basis for modern civilizations and modern economies, improve negotiations, and treat patients with neurologic and psychiatric disorders.