Neil Shubin, author of Your Inner Fish. is provost of The Field Museum of Natural History as well as a professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago, where he also serves as an associate dean. Educated at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of California at Berkeley, he lives in Chicago. Your Inner Fish, published in January of 2008, is his first book. Dr. Shubin served on Penn's faculty from 1989 to 2002 and was the first Faculty Master of Hamilton College House (now Rodin College House).

You can read more about Dr. Shubin and his work on our About the Author page.

Andrew Binns, moderator. Dr. Binns is the Carolyn Hoff Lynch Professor of Biology in the School of Arts and Sciences and is the Associate Provost for Education. He chairs the Council of Undergraduate Deans, the Council of Graduate Deans, and the Graduate Council of the Faculties. In addition to all undergraduate and graduate educational initiatives across the university, he oversees the Office of Student Conduct, the Center for Undergraduate Research and Fellowships, College Houses and Academic Services, International Student and Scholar Services, Penn Abroad, the Graduate Student Center, and the Weiss Tech House.

Read more about Andrew Binns on the Biology Department website.

Peter Dodson holds three degrees in earth sciences. He has spent his entire career as a gross anatomist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, with a secondary appointment in the Dept. of Geology. He is also a research associate at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia. He has done extensive fieldwork in the western United States and Canada. In 1981 he discovered a new horned dinosaur in Montana, which he described as Avaceratops lammersi in 1986. He is co-editor of The Dinosauria, The Horned Dinosaurs and several children’s books, including An Alphabet of Dinosaurs. He taught a Templeton course on science and religion at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999, and is president emeritus of Metanexus Institute.

Read more about Peter Dodson on the Metanexus Institute website.

Janet Monge is the Associate Director of the Casting Program at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, Adjunct Associate Professor of Anthropology and Co-Curator of the new exhibit, Surviving: The Body of Evidence at the University Museum. It is her plan to develop a “virtual museum” of skeletal collections so that researchers from all around the world can use these CT scans of the Penn Museum collection as part of their own research design.  As of June 2007, over 3,000 skeletal materials have been scanned and entered into the database. Her own research interest in the project stems from the use of the scans for comparative purposes to the study of Human Evolution, specifically in the understanding of the cranial-facial morphology and dentition of Neanderthals.

Photo of Janet Monge by Candace DeCarlo.

Read more about Janet Monge on her website.