Russell D. Fernald, Ph.D., is a Professor of Biological Sciences and the Benjamin Scott Crocker Professor in Human Biology at Stanford University (California). He received his Bachelor's degree from Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, PA) and his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia). Dr. Fernald completed a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. O. Creutzfeldt at the Max-Planck-Institute for Psychiatry, in Munich, Germany, and a postdoctoral fellowship with Dr. Konrad Lorenz at the Max-Planck-Institute for Behavioral Physiology. In 2004 he shared the Rank Prize for discoveries about lens function. Dr. Fernald's lab uses an African cichlid fish species to study how social experience influences the brain and how retinal progenitor cell division and differentiation are controlled.