James A. Simmons is a pioneer in the field of biosonar. His research includes behavioral and neurophysiological studies of sound processing in the echolocating bat. From the time he began graduate research in the late 1960s to the present, he has been in the forefront of bat echolocation research. Simmons was honored as a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) in 1996 and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2000. He was awarded the ASA's second Silver Medal in Animal Bioacoustics in 2005. His current position is Professor in the Department of Neuroscience, Brown University. Education Simmons obtained his bachelor's degree from Lafayette College in 1965 with a double major in Psychology and Chemistry. He then earned a master's degree in 1968 and a Ph.D. in Psychology in 1969 from Princeton University. Simmons's graduate research involved studies of echolocation in bats, under the mentorship of E. Glen Wever, one of the giants in physiological acoustics. At that time, acceptance of the processes underlying spatial perception by echolocation was not universal, and one of the exciting moments of his graduate training came when a skeptical Nobel Laureate, Georg von Békésy, on one of his periodic visits to Wever's lab, came to see the behaving bats in "Building B. The demonstration that Simmons conducted not only convinced Békésy that bats echolocated but that they also use echo delay to estimate target distance. It was not until some years later that Simmons found out that this was a set-up engineered by Wever and Donald Griffin, who was then at the Rockefeller University, to convince Békésy about the bat's extraordinary use of echolocation to determine target range. Simmons's dissertation was entitled "Perception of target distance by echolocating bats. After receiving his Ph.D., Simmons remained at Princeton University as a National Institutes of Health postdoctoral trainee for two years. Research Simmons continued his research on bat echolocation after he moved to Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri in 1971, as an assistant professor in the Neural Science Program that was housed in the Psychology Department. Between 1980 and 1984, he taught and conducted research as a professor in the Department of Biology and Institute of Neuroscience, University of Oregon in Eugene, Oregon. In 1984, Simmons moved to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, where his wife Andrea had been hired as an assistant professor in the Psychology Department. Both