Erich Jarvis

Erich Jarvis is an American professor at Rockefeller University.

He is the head of a team of researchers who study the neurobiology of vocal learning, a critical behavioral substrate for spoken language.

By studying animals including songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds, his research attempts to show that bird groups have similar learning abilities to humans in the context of sound, such as learning new sounds and then passing on vocal repertoires from one generation to the next.

Jarvis focuses on the molecular pathways involved in the perception and production of learned vocalizations, and the development of brain circuits for vocal learning.

Erich Jarvis was born in Harlem, New York in 1965.

Jarvis was one of four children of Sasha McCall, a gospel singer, and James Jarvis, a musician and amateur scientist.

Since the age of six, he was primarily raised by his mother, after his parents divorced in 1970.

Jarvis credits his family, and primarily his father's mind and enthusiasm for science, for his interest in biology.

Jarvis turned down an Alvin Ailey American Dance theater audition to study at Hunter College, where he received a B.A. in Biology and Mathematics in 1988.

During his undergraduate years at Hunter, he had six scientific publications.

His father had drug-induced schizophrenia and was homeless, living in various parks, prior to becoming the victim of a fatal shooting in 1989.

Jarvis attended the High School for the Performing Arts in Manhattan, where he studied ballet.

He continued his education at Rockefeller University, earning a Ph.D. in Animal Behavior and Molecular Neurobehavior under Fernando Nottebohm in 1995.

Jarvis became an assistant and an adjunct assistant professor at Rockefeller University from 1995 to 2002.

He continued his postdoctoral education at Rockefeller University until 1998.

In 2002, the National Science Foundation awarded Jarvis the Alan T. Waterman Award.

In 2005 he was awarded the National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award providing funding for five years to researchers pursuing innovative approaches to biomedical research.

In 2008, Jarvis was selected as Investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

He then was an associate professor of neurobiology at Duke University Medical Center until December 2016, when he returned to Rockefeller University, where he is professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics of Language.

The focus of Jarvis' research is the vocal learning capabilities in birds and how they learn to mimic sounds.

His research with songbirds is being used to show the evolution of human language capacity and speech disorders.

His research combines behavioral, anatomical, electrophysiological, molecular biological, and genomic techniques.

The discoveries of Jarvis and his collaborators include the first findings of natural behaviorally regulated gene expression in the avian brain, social context dependent gene regulation, convergent vocal learning systems across distantly related animal groups, the FOXP2 gene in vocal learning birds, and the finding that vocal learning systems may have evolved out of ancient motor learning systems.

His research identifies the neurological basis of birdsong at the tissue, cellular and genetic levels.

A recent project seeks to transform birds without songs such as pigeons into birds that sing by genetic neuro-engineering, e.g. injecting new genes into the forebrain.

If successful, this could have implications for treating patients with loss of speech after stroke.