Emily Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, a scientist with special standing at the Great Ape Trust in Iowa, has conducted pioneering language research with bonobos. She initially studied cognitive and verbal learning processes in children, then took up an investigation of similar processes in common chimpanzees, and for more than thirty years has focused on symbolic and cognitive processes in bonobos. A cum laude graduate of Southern Methodist University, she studied at the University of Oklahoma on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship and earned a Ph.D. in psychology in 1975. After a post-doctoral fellowship at Georgia State University, she joined the faculty of the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center at Emory University as an assistant research professor. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh was appointed an adjunct associate professor of biology at Georgia State in 1983 and an associate research professor at Yerkes the next year, posts she held until accepting a professorship in biology and psychology at Georgia State in 1992. She moved on to the Great Ape Trust as lead scientist in 2004 and was named to her present position three years later. Her research has been supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Emory, the World Wildlife Fund, the John Templeton Foundation, and the Milt Harris Foundation. A fellow of the American Psychological Association, she has been a Sigma Xi National Lecturer and holds honorary degrees from the University of Missouri and the University of Chicago. Dr. Savage-Rumbaugh serves on the editorial board of Psychological Record. She has published some 175 scientific papers and is the author or co-author of six books, including Ape Language: From Conditioned Responses to Symbol (1986), Kanzi: A Most Improbable Ape (1993), and, most recently, (with S.G. Shanker and T.J. Taylor) of Apes, Language, and the Human Mind, which was published by Oxford University Press in 1998.