Simon LeVay

Simon LeVay (born 28 August 1943 in Oxford, England) is a British-American neuroscientist.

He received a bachelor's degree in natural sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1966, a Ph.D. in Neuroanatomy at the University of Göttingen in Germany, and completed his postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard Medical School in 1974.

LeVay held positions in neurobiology at the Harvard Medical School from 1974 to 1984. He then worked at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies from 1984 to 1993 while holding an Associate Professorship in Biology at the University of California, San Diego. Much of his early work focused on the visual cortex in animals.

While working at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, LeVay published an article in ''Science'' that compared the size of the "Interstitial Nucleus of the Anterior Hypothalamus" (INAH3) in a group of gay men to a group of straight men and women. This was the first scientific study ever published that showed brain differences based on sexual orientation. The study results were featured on PBS, ''Newsweek'', ''Nightline'', ''Donahue'', and ''The Oprah Winfrey Show''.

In 1992, he took a leave of absence from Salk to help form the Institute of Gay and Lesbian Education (IGLE) in West Hollywood with Chris Patrouch and Lauren Jardine. He never returned.

LeVay has spoken extensively on the topic of human sexuality at a number of venues and published a number of books. In 2003 he became a lecturer in Human Sexuality Studies at Stanford University. Provided by Wikipedia