Nottebohm, Fernando

FERNANDO NOTTEBOHM IS the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Professor and director of the Laboratory [Page 396]of Animal Behavior at Rockefeller University in New York. Although he is primarily an animal researcher, his work on brain function since the 1980s has revolutionized the field of neurobiology and opened up new frontiers for researchers interested in stem cell biology.

A native of Argentina, Nottebohm received his doctoral degree from the University of California at Berkeley in 1966 and joined the Rockefeller faculty in 1967. He has spent most of his career studying songbirds, specifically, how they learn to sing. While studying chickadees in the early 1980s, he began to question one of the basic presumptions of neuroscience: That animals (including humans) are born with all the brain cells they ...