2015 AAAS Annual Meeting (12-16 February 2015)

February 12 - 16, 2015

Neil Shubin: Finding Your Inner Fish

Plenary Lecture Dr. Neil Shubin is a paleontologist and evolutionary biologist who researches the origin of animal anatomical features. He has done field work in Greenland, Africa, Asia, and North America. One of his discoveries, Tiktaalik roseae, has been described as the “missing link” between fish and land animals. He has also done important work on the developmental biology of limbs, and he uses his diverse fossil findings to devise hypotheses on how anatomical transformations occurred by way of genetic and morphogenetic processes. He is a fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He earned a Ph.D. in organismic and evolutionary biology from Harvard University. Shubin’s popular science book Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body was adapted for a PBS documentary series in 2014.