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MARK JUDE TRAMO, M.D., Ph.D. Jude Tramo, Harvard Medical School & Massachusetts General Hospital; Director, Institute for Music and Brain Science, is one of the world's leading researchers on brain research and music perception.  He holds posts at Harvard Medical School, The Eaton-Peabody Laboratory of Auditory Physiology at the Massachusetts Eye & Ear Infirmary, The Research Laboratory of Electronics at M.I.T., and is on the staff at Massachusetts General Hospital and McLean Hospital.  He holds numerous awards and honors and is the Associate Editor of "Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience" and Consulting Editor for "Music Perception."

Jelle Atema, Director, Boston University - Marine Biology Laboratory. Jelle Atema is Director of Boston University's Marine Program at Woods Hole, MA and has received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the Whitehall Foundation, among others for his research in sensory biology of aquatic organisms.  He has written a number of books and articles and has been a contributing author to The New York Times, The National Geographic, National Wildlife, Science, and Discover magazines.  He is also a researcher of "the roots of human culture."  This research has resulted in his reconstruction of the world's oldest musical instrument, a 30,000 year old bone flute, as well as other paleo and neolithic flutes.

Luis Baptista (deceased June 2000) Luis Baptista, Chair & Curator, Department of Ornithology & Mammalogy, California Academy of Sciences.  He received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Biology from the University of San Francisco and his Ph.D. in Zoology at the University of California, Berkley.  After post-doctoral studies at the Max Planck Institute for Verhaltensphysiologie in Germany, Luis joined the biology faculty at Occidental College in Los Angeles where he taught for seven years and curated the collections of the Moore Laboratory of Zoology.  He joined the Academy staff in 1980 and continued his studies on avian systematics and ethology.  His work took him to the rainforest of New Guinea, Costa Rica, Caribbean Islands, the Amazon, and much of western Europe where he studied displays, song and ecology of birds.  He co-authored the popular college textbook "The Life of Birds."

W. Tecumseh Fitch, Ph.D. - University of St. Andrews, studies the evolution of cognition in animals and man, focusing on the evolution of communication. Originally trained in ethology and evolutionary biology, he applied his graduate training in speech science and neuroscience to understanding the physics and physiology of animal vocal communication.

He is interested in all aspects of vocal communication in vertebrates (including alligators, seals, birds and monkeys), especially aspects of vocal production that bear on questions of meaning in animal communication systems, including human language. He is particularly interested in the evolution of language, and has stressed the value of an empirical, comparative approach to this problem, using data from diverse living species to address this peculiarly human characteristic.