Education: PhD, University of Texas, 1999
Dr. Phelps got his PhD in Integrative Biology from the University of Texas in 1999. As a graduate student he received pre-doctoral fellowships from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI) and the National Institutes of Health. As a post-doc, he was a fellow at STRI and at the NSF Center for Behavioral Neuroscience in Atlanta. He was a faculty member at the University of Florida from 2002-2010, and joined the University of Texas in 2010. He is currently an Associate Professor of Integrative Biology, and the Director and co-founder of UT-Austin's Center for Brain, Behavior and Evolution. He is a member of graduate programs in Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, Cell and Molecular Biology, Neuroscience and Psychology. His lab has been funded by NSF, NIH and National Geographic. (A CV is available here.) His principal interest is in understanding individual and species differences in social cognition by investigating their mechanistic and evolutionary basis. Related topics include social neuroscience, epigenetics, and evolutionary genetics. Other interests include the evolution of brain size, signal detection and information theory, sexual selection, and human evolution. He also likes softball, good writing, and old country music.