Ronald R. Hoy is the David and Dorothy Merksamer Professor of Biology and an Howard Hughes Medical Institute Professor at Cornell University. His career has focused on the neuroethology and bioacoustics of insect songs. His laboratory has investigated the ultrasound-mediated interaction between bats and flying insects, the neuromechanical basis of sound localization in miniscule auditory organs, and the diversity of hearing organs in insects and spiders. His personal interests are in comparative and evolutionary cognitive neuroscience, including music cognition, especially the relationship between language and music. His laboratory has turned to the integration between acoustic and visual signals as part of a program in multimodal, cross-sensory integration in the brain.

Hoy was an undergraduate at Whitman College and Washington State University, where he majored in Zoology and Psychology. His graduate studies in biology were done at Stanford University and followed by a Ph.D. in neurophysiology in Donald Kennedy’s laboratory (1969). He did a postdoc with David Bentley, at Berkeley, on the neurogenetics of cricket songs. His first faculty position in 1971 was at Stony Brook University and he moved to Cornell University 1973 to the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior, where he has remained since. Roy spent many summers at the Marine Biological Laboratory, where he directed the Neural Systems and Behavior course, and was involved in the Grass Foundation Summer Fellows Program.

Mr. Hoy will appear in a panel discussion and introduce Messiaen’s Catalogue d’oiseaux on Saturday, March 7.