Georg Striedter is an Associate Professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior at the University of California, Irvine, and a fellow of the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. He received his undergraduate training at Cornell University, obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California in San Diego, and pursued postdoctoral research at the California Institute of Technology. For his dissertation, Dr. Striedter studied the organization and evolution of neuronal circuits in teleost fishes. Later, he showed that parrots and songbirds have independently evolved very different, though functionally similar, neuronal circuits for vocal learning. Dr. Striedter and his colleagues also showed that male parrots tend to imitate the calls made by their female mates and that female parrots, in turn, prefer the males who imitate them well. Dr. Striedter’s current research focuses on the question of how evolution modifies the processes of brain development to generate a broad diversity of adult brains. In 1998, Dr. Striedter received the C. J. Herrick Award for his contributions to comparative neuroanatomy and, in 2005, he published a well received book entitled Principles of Brain Evolution. In the picture he is leaning over a cake his colleagues at the CNLM gave him just after the brain evolution book came out. Perhaps he is trying to have his cake and eat it, too. Hoping for another cake in the future, Dr. Striedter has started writing a new book, which he proposes to call Functional neurobiology: the human nervous system explored in light of the problems it helps us solve. If you want to send Dr. Striedter an e-mail, click here: e-mail.