Darcy B. Kelley is the HHMI and Harold Weintraub Professor of Department Biological Sciences at Columbia University. Dr. Kelley’s research focuses on the sexual differentiation of the nervous system and the evolution and neurobiology of vocal communication. Her laboratory studies South African clawed frogs, Xenopus, species with a particularly rich vocal repertoire that is specific for each sex and social-context dependent. Females sing to males, and males sing to females and to other males. She seeks to determine how these vocal signals are produced by the nervous system and shaped across evolution and how acoustic information is deciphered and acted upon. As an HHMI Professor, Dr. Kelley started the Columbia Core undergraduate course "Frontiers of Science" and has a strong commitment to bringing science to the general public through public lectures as well as the EST/Sloan Foundation project to encourage artists to create imaginative and engaging plays and other performances that portray science and technology realistically as well as revealing scientific creativity and conflicts.
Principal Investigator