Irene Pepperberg

Irene Pepperberg (S.B, MIT, ’69; Ph.D., Harvard, ’76) is a Research Associate and lecturer at Harvard. She has been a visiting Assistant Professor at Northwestern University, a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Arizona, a visiting Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and an adjunct Associate Professor at Brandeis University. She received John Simon Guggenheim, Whitehall, Harry Frank Guggenheim, and Radcliffe Fellowships, was an alternate for the Cattell Award for Psychology, won the 2000 Selby Fellowship (Australian Academy of Sciences), the 2005 Frank Beach Award for best paper in comparative psychology, was nominated for the 2000 Weizmann, L’Oreal, and Grawemeyer Awards, the Animal Behavior Society’s 2001 Quest Award and 2015 Exemplar Award, and was renominated for the 2001 L’Oreal Award. She won the2013 Clavius Award for research from St. Johns University. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation (US).  Her book, The Alex Studies, describing over 20 years of peer-reviewed experiments on Grey parrots, was favorably reviewed in publications as diverse as the New York Times and Science. Her memoir, Alex & Me, a New York Times bestseller, won a Christopher Award. She has published over 100 scholarly articles in peer reviewed journals and as book chapters. She is a fellow of the Animal Behavior Society, the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, the American Ornithologists’ Union, AAAS, the Midwestern Psychological Society, the Eastern Psychological Association. She serves as consulting editor for three journals and as associate editor for The Journal of Comparative Psychology.