Two new A.D. White Professors-at-Large have been appointed recently to enliven Cornell's intellectual and cultural life. They are anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy and Margaret McFall-Ngai, an organismic biologist and ecologist. Their six-year terms run through June 2017.

Hrdy is an anthropologist, primatologist and human behaviorist whose work has advanced the understanding of primate parenting and infanticide; cooperative child care in human societies; the evolution of human families; gender equality and inequality in monkeys, apes and humans; and most recently, the importance of cooperative infant care to the evolution of empathy and the theory of the mind. Her work spans the fields of evolutionary and behavioral biology, primatology, human ecology and development, and the evolution of the family. She is a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California-Davis.

Discover Magazine called her one of the "Fifty Most Important Women in Science" in 2001, and she was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1990 and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1992. She has won numerous awards, including the American Anthropology Association's Howells Prize for Outstanding Contribution to Biological Anthropology.

Hrdy is perhaps best known for her trilogy of popular scientific books: "The Woman That Never Evolved," which the New York Times Book Review named a Notable Book of the Year in Science and Social Science in 1981; "Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants and Natural Selection," a 1999 finalist for the PEN USA WEST 200 Literary Award for Research Nonfiction; and "Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding."

McFall-Ngai is considered an international leader and expert in the study of interactions between microbes and their animal hosts. One of the foremost life scientists encompassing the fields of immunology, symbiosis and marine biology, she is a professor of medical microbiology and immunology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an affiliate professor at the University of Hawaii.

Upcoming visits

Anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy will make her first visit to campus Oct. 15-23. A public lecture on "The Origin of Emotionally Modern Humans: What It Means to Develop and Evolve as a Cooperatively Breeding Ape" will take place Oct. 17, 4 p.m., G-10 Biotechnology Building. Margaret McFall-Ngai, an organismic biologist and ecologist, is scheduled to visit during fall 2012.

For the 2011-12 academic year, visits from current professors-at-large include:

• Oct. 1-9, conservationist Jeff McNeely;

• March 28 and April 11, choreographer William Forsythe;

• April 2-6, political scientist James Scott; and

• April 16-20, political economist Lord Robert Skidelsky.

Her work on the ability of squid to acquire and activate bioluminescent bacteria cuts across the disciplines of physiology, ecology, immunology and evolutionary biology. Her major research interests focus on symbiotic associations between animals and single-celled organisms. They include signaling between partners during establishment and maintenance of a symbiosis, the influence of bacteria on animal development, the evolution of animal-bacterial interactions, and the design of tissues that interact with light --the biochemical basis of transparency and reflectivity.

McFall-Ngai is the recipient of numerous honors that include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and she is the EU/Marie Curie ITN Researcher at Germany's Max Planck Institute. Most recently she was appointed to the advisory board of the Global Health Initiative at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and to the California Institute of Technology's Gordon and Betty Moore Endowed Sabbatical Professorship.

She has produced a prolific output of research publications in such top journals as Science and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a strong advocate for science education in the United States.

There are 18 active professors-at-large. They visit campus at least two times for about a week during their six-year term to conduct public programs and engage in intellectual exchange with faculty and students in classroom, laboratory and informal settings. Past appointees include filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, primatologist Jane Goodall, novelists Toni Morrison and Eudora Welty, poets Octavio Paz and Adrienne Rich, physician Oliver Sacks, and actor John Cleese.