STEVE NOWICKI

Steve Nowicki is Bass Fellow and Professor in the Departments of Biology, Psychology, and Neurobiology at Duke University . Nowicki received both B.S. and M.S. degrees from Tufts University, the latter under the guidance of Ben Dane at Tufts and Ken Armitage of the University of Kansas . He received his doctorate in Neurobiology and Behavior at Cornell University in 1985 under the direction of Tom Eisner. After leaving Cornell, Nowicki did post-doctoral work and was appointed assistant professor at The Rockefeller University, working in Peter Marler's laboratory at Rockefeller's Field Station in Millbrook. He has been at Duke since 1989 and was appointed Dean of Natural Sciences there in 2004. In 2007, Steve became the Dean of Undergraduate Education at Duke.

Nowicki's research explores proximate mechanisms underlying the evolution of behavior. He is especially interested in the structure, function, and evolution of animal communication systems, using birdsong as a model system. His current research includes work on the evolution of signal complexity, constraints on signal evolution, and mechanisms of signal production and perception. This work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and several private foundations including the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Whitehall Foundation, and the Mary Flagler Cary Charitable Trust.

In 1999, Nowicki was named a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation . He spent part of his fellowship working in the Molecular Population Biology research group in the Department of Ecology at Lund University in Sweden.

In 1996, Nowicki introduced major curricular reforms to the introductory biology course at Duke, emphasizing both a novel conceptual organization and the development of small-group active learning exercises conducted in "seminar" groups embedded in the larger class as a whole. This course was recognized as part of an NSF RAIRE grant awarded to Duke in 1997. In 2004, Nowicki published a video lecture series based on this introductory biology course, titled "Biology: The Science of Life" (The Teaching Company: Chantilly , VA ). He is also is author of "Biology," a high school introductory biology text book published in 2007 by McDougal-Littell. Nowicki taught an upper-level neurobiology course at Duke, which earned him the Robert B. Cox Trinity College Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992, and he currently also teaches upper-level and graduate courses on animal behavior and communication.

Among his professional activities, Nowicki was Chair of the Division of Animal Behavior in the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology from 1996 to 2000 and he currently is serving in the four-year presidential cycle of the Animal Behavior Society . From 1994 to 1998, Nowicki was a member of the National Institute of Mental Health's Psychobiology, Behavior and Neuroscience grant advisory study section. He also serves regularly on proposal review panels for the Animal Behavior Program of the National Science Foundation. In addition to being a dean, Nowicki also served as a member of the Duke University Pep Band from 2004 to 2006, balancing his professional time between research, administration, and basketball games. Click here for a PDF of Steve's Curriculum Vitae

Website last modified January 2009