Erich Jarvis


Erich Jarvis is an American professor at The Rockefeller University. He leads a team of researchers who study the neurobiology of vocal learning, a critical behavioral substrate for spoken language. The animal models he studies include songbirds, parrots, and hummingbirds. Like humans, these bird groups have the ability to learn new sounds and pass on their vocal repertoires culturally, 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.
In 2002, the National Science Foundation awarded Jarvis its highest honor for a young researcher, 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 Dr. Jarvis was selected to the prestigious position of Investigator for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.

Life and career

Erich Jarvis was born in Harlem, New York. 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 divorcing his father in 1970. Jarvis credits his family, and primarily his father's mind and enthusiasm for science, for his interest in biology. His father suffered from 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. 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 The Rockefeller University, he had six scientific publications. He continued his education at The Rockefeller University, earning a Ph.D. in Animal Behavior and Molecular Neurobehavior under Dr. Fernando Nottebohm in 1995. He continued his postdoctoral education at The Rockefeller University until 1998.
Jarvis became an assistant and an adjunct assistant professor at The Rockefeller University in 1995 until 2002.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 a 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. To accomplish this objective, Dr. Jarvis takes an integrative approach to research, combining behavioral, anatomical, electrophysiological, molecular biological, and genomic techniques. The discoveries of Dr. Jarvis and his collaborators include the first findings of natural behaviorally regulated gene expression in the 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 cutting edge research identifies the neurological basis of birdsong at the tissue, cellular and genetic levels. A recent project seeks to transform birds without songs such a 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.

Awards and honors