W. Tecumseh Fitch is a reader in psychology at the University of St. Andrews. His research concerns the evolution and neural basis of cognition in human beings and other animals with a special focus on communication systems, including speech, language, and music. He emphasizes the value of an empirical, comparative approach, using data from many species to study peculiarly human characteristics. A graduate of Brown University, where he was elected to Sigma Xi and earned a bachelor’s degree with honors in biology, he went on to take a Ph.D. in cognitive and linguistic sciences at Brown in 1994 and received a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Postdoctoral Fellowship to continue his studies at the Harvard-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Program in Speech and Hearing Science and Biotechnology. In 1999, he was appointed a lecturer in organismic and evolutionary biology and in psychology at Harvard, and three years later, he was named a visiting fellow at the European Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin. He became a lecturer at St. Andrews in 2003 and was promoted to his present position earlier this year. Dr. Fitch has been the Leibniz (Visiting) Professor at the University of Leipzig and a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. He also has held a visiting fellowship at the British Columbia Advanced Systems Institute in Victoria, B.C. A scientific advisor to the American Museum of Natural History for its new permanent exhibition on Human Origins and to the BioMusic Museum Exhibition at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, he serves as an associate editor of PloSOne and of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Dr. Fitch is the author of some seventy papers published in scientific journals. He has studied Ghanaian drumming and performed with a salsa band. He plays the guitar, piano, and percussion as well as composing music.