ICTP Prize Winner Bernardo Gabriel Mindlin will present the 2004 ICTP Prize Lecture at 16:00 in the Main Lecture Hall. Mindlin, an internationally recognized expert in bird physiology and vocal apparatus, will speak on “The Physics and Neural Control of Birdsong". A professor of physics at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina and author of more than 50 peer-reviewed journal articles, Mindlin has made major contributions to our understanding of nonlinear dynamical systems in such diverse fields as solar activity, lasers, neural modelling, speech recognition and birdsongs. Of the 10,000 species of birds known to exist, 4000 share a remarkable characteristic with humans: they require some tutoring to make meaningful sounds. Mindlin’s lecture will examine the physical mechanisms at work in the production of a birdsong, the acoustical effects that the avian vocal organ is capable of generating, and the nature of the neural instructions needed to drive this tuneful process. The 2004 ICTP Prize is being given in honour of Arthur Taylor Winfree, a distinguished professor of theoretical physics and Regents’ Professor at the University of Arizona, USA, who died of brain cancer on 5 November 2002.