Research on the Intelligence of Bonobos at the Great Ape Trust - Sue Savage

Speaker:

Rumbaugh

01 Dec 2005

8:00 PM

1148 Gerdin Auditorium

Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Add to Calendar

Dr. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is the first and only scientist doing language research with bonobos. She joined the Great Ape Trust in Des Moines following a 23-year association with Georgia State University's Language Research Center. There, she helped pioneer the use of a number of technologies for working with primates. Dr. Rumbaugh's work with Kanzi, the first ape to learn language in the same manner as children, as detailed in Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development (1993) was selected by the "Millennium Project" as one of the top 100 most influential works in cognitive science in the 20th century by the University of Minnesota's Center for Cognitive Sciences. She earned her doctorate in psychology and her masters in biology from the University of Oklahoma.

This lecture was made possible in part by the generosity of F. Wendell Miller, who left his entire estate jointly to Iowa State University and the University of Iowa. Mr. Miller, who died in 1995 at age 97, was born in Altoona, Illinois, grew up in Rockwell City, graduated from Grinnell College and Harvard Law School and practiced law in Des Moines and Chicago before returning to Rockwell City to manage his family's farm holdings and to practice law. His will helped to establish the F. Wendell Miller Trust, the annual earnings on which, in part, helped to support this activity.