Department of Anthropology
Faculty of Life Sciences
Althanstr. 14
A-1090 Vienna, AUSTRIA

phone: 0043 (0) 1 4277 54721
secretariat: 0043 (0) 1 4277 54701
fax: 0043 (0) 1 4277 9547
email: fred.bookstein@univie.ac.at
Homepage: http://www.virtual-anthropology.com/Members/fbookstein

Fred Bookstein is an American mathematical  biologist who teaches in Vienna.

       I earned an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in statistics  and zoology from the University of Michigan in 1977.  I remained  there for almost thirty years more,  pursuing statistical and biological research and  interdisciplinary teaching, singing in  community choruses, and operating a bed-and-breakfast with my wife.

 Around the turn of the present century I also began commuting to  the University of Vienna as a professor in  the Department of Anthropology.  That relationship endures  even now that I have retired from Michigan and relocated to the  University of Washington in Seattle.

       In Vienna I am Task Administrator (chief scientist) of  EVAN, an EU 6th Programme Marie Curie  labor mobility grant for training and  research in morphometrics and visualization in anthropology and  other structural biomedical sciences.  My teaching assignments  include not only morphometrics (the statistics of  biological shape and shape change,  a specialty I invented) but also science  writing and introductory statistical  reasoning. In Seattle I am Professor of Statistics, teaching  freshmen where numbers come from, and Professor of Psychiatry,  where I serve as Scientific Director of the Fetal  Alcohol and Drug Unit. There I oversee a research programme  that studies brain images from people exposed to alcohol  before birth.  One emphasis is on the translation of this  scientific knowledge for use by parents, schools, and courts of law.

 The work on brains of newborn babies is going forward in  Europe as well. I have published more than 350 articles  on a wide range of subjects including morphometric methods,  medical image computing, human evolution, fetal alcohol  damage, craniofacial growth, and philosophy of biology.

 But I have also contributed computer graphics routines to  dance concerts.

My discussion remarks today are the second in a series for  the VCC.  The common concern is that studies of  consciousness, whatever the  rhetoric of their various fields of origin,  need to take into account what we know about  variations of the neuroanatomical brain, including birth  defects like fetal alcohol damage.