Dr. David Van Essen, “Your Brain, My Brain, and a Chimpanzee’s Brain: What’s the Difference, and Why Should We Care?”

The quest to understand the human brain in health and disease is a grand challenge for the 21st century and beyond. This talk will focus on the cerebral cortex, which is the dominant structure of our brains and largely responsible for what makes us unique as a species and unique as individuals—each with our distinctive personalities, intellectual capabilities, and personal foibles. Recent progress using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has provided intriguing answers to some questions but leaves many others as truly daunting.

David Van Essen is the Alumni Endowed Professor of Neurobiology at Washington University in St Louis. For nearly 50 years he has studied the structure, function, connectivity, development, and evolution of cerebral cortex in humans and nonhuman primates. He recently led the Human Connectome Project (HCP), a large-scale effort that acquired, analyzed, and freely shared high-quality neuroimaging data from 1200 healthy adults.  Dr. Van Essen received his undergraduate degree from Caltech and his Ph.D. from Harvard University. He joined the Caltech faculty in 1976 and moved to Washington University in 1992 to chair the Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology for 20 years.  He has served in many other leadership positions, including President of the Society of Neuroscience and founding chair of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. He has received numerous awards and honors, notably including the Glass Brain Award from the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, the George A. Miller Prize from the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, and the Carl and Gerti Cori Faculty Achievement Award from Washington University. He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and a member of the National Academy of Sciences.