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UA professor honored for research on Grey Parrots

Australian Academy of Sciences, American Psychological

A UA researcher world-renowned for her work on African Grey Parrots has received two honors that will enable her to promote her research more.

Irene Pepperberg, an associate professor in ecology and evolutionary biology with a joint appointment in psychology, was recently awarded the 2000 Selby Fellowship from the Australian Academy of Sciences and was named a Fellow of the American Psychological Association.

Pepperberg said people from all over the world were nominated for this fellowship.

"It's truly amazing that I was chosen for this fellowship because in Australia some parrots, like the birds that I study, are considered agricultural pests," she said.

The focus of her research has been on the Congo African Grey parrot. Perhaps the most famous of these is Alex, a bird that has been the subject of various books and is featured on a Web site.

She has sought to determine the cognitive and communicative abilities of this species.

In addition, she has done a comparative study that includes the Grey parrots with great apes, young children and marine mammals. She studies both the mechanisms as well as the outcomes of learning.

Pepperberg, who has been researching for almost 23 years, is funded by the National Science and Alex Foundations.

"This is a really great honor for me because it means that I am accepted and respected by my peers," Pepperberg said. "Anyone who works in psychology can become a member of the American Psychological Society, but not anyone can become a fellow."

"The process for becoming a fellow is very, very selective," she added.

In addition to these two recent awards, Pepperberg is also a member of the Animal Behavior Society and the American Ornithologists' Union.

She has recently been featured in the New York Times, Discover, New Scientist and the Public Broadcasting Service series "Nature."

She has also published a book entitled "The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots."

The book, published by the Harvard University Press, brings her "groundbreaking experiments together into a panoramic view," Bernd Heinreich wrote in the New York Times Book Review.

The goal of the book is "to provoke awareness in humans that animals have capacities that are far greater than we were once lead to expect, and to remind us that all we need to examine these capacities are some enlightened research tools," Pepperberg wrote.

She received her doctorate in chemical physics from Harvard University and joined the University of Arizona in the Spring 1991. Pepperberg is currently a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology until August 2000.

The Selby Fellowship will allow an expense paid trip to Australia for a lecture tour where Pepperberg will discuss her research.

This trip will be made over a three week period in June.