Dr. Gordon Burghardt is Alumni Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He was Editor of the Journal of Comparative Psychology from 2006-11 and Past-President of Division 6 (Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology) of the American Psychological Association. He is also a past President of the Animal Behavior Society and a Fellow of several societies including the AAAS. He has published research on the behavior of many species including snakes, turtles, lizards, birds, bears, and humans. His research interests include: Chemoreception in snakes, predatory behavior, heritability of learned behavior, and the evolution of playfulness. He is author or editor of several books including The Genesis of Animal Play: Testing the Limits (MIT press), in which he examines the origins and evolution of play in humans and animals. He asks what play might mean in our understanding of evolution, the brain, behavioral organization, and psychology. Is play essential to development? Is it the driving force behind human and animal behavior? What is the proper place for the study of play in the cognitive, behavioral, and biological sciences? He has been a Visiting Professor at Rockefeller University and Kyoto University and has appeared on Radiolab and PBS.
Gordon Burghard
Gordon Burghadt’s books on Amazon