Stephen Nowicki, Bass Fellow, professor of biology, and dean of Undergraduate Education at Duke University, studies the ecology and evolution of animal behavior with a special emphasis on questions related to the diversity and complexity of animal communication signals. He uses bird song as a model system and has focused on trying to understand how birds sing and what they do with their songs. His research involves both field studies and laboratory experiments. Dr. Nowicki also holds appointments in the psychology and neurosciences department in Duke’s Trinity College and in the neurobiology department in the university’s School of Medicine. A summa cum laude graduate of Tufts University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, he had earlier aspired to be a classical musician. But he went on to earn a master’s degree in biology at Tufts and, in 1985, a Ph.D. in neurobiology and behavior at Cornell University, where he held Andrew White and Henry Sage fellowships and was elected to Sigma Xi. After a postdoctoral research fellowship at the Rockefeller University, he joined the faculty there as an assistant professor. In 1989, he moved on to Duke and was appointed Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in 1999. Five years later, Dr. Nowicki was named dean of Natural Sciences, a post he held until 2007 when he accepted his present position. A former Guggenheim Fellow, he has also held a Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust Fellowship and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship. He was elected a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society in 1998 and served as its president for four years. Dr. Nowicki is the recipient of a teaching award from Duke. His research has been primarily supported by the National Science Foundation. He has delivered invited lectures throughout the United States and in Canada, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. The author of more than eighty papers published in scientific journals or in volumes of collected works, he is the co-author (with W.A. Searcy) of The Evolution of Animal Communication: Reliability and Deception in Signaling Systems (2005). His Biology, a high school textbook, was published by McDougall-Littell earlier this year. From time to time, Dr. Nowicki plays the trombone and tuba in the Duke Pep Band.