Surgeon, Author, Educator, Inventor, Speaker

A two-time guest lecturer at Brigid's Place, Leonard Shlain is the Chairman of Laparoscopic surgery at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco and is an Associate Professor of Surgery at UCSF. He is also the author of two critically acclaimed, award-winning books. Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light, (HarperCollins) published in 1991, is presently used as a textbook in many art schools and universities. It has also been translated into foreign languages.

 Dr. Shlain lectures widely both here and in Europe. He has been a keynote speaker for such diverse groups as the Smithsonian, Harvard University, Salk Institute, Phillips collection, Los Alamos National Laboratory, NASA Johnson Space Center, and the European Union’s Ministers of Culture. In 1999, he was a contributor to Academic Press’ Encyclopedia of Creatitvity edited by Steven Runco and Mark Pritzker.

Dr. Shlain has won several literary awards for his visionary work and also holds several patents on innovative surgical devices. His most recent work, Sex, Time & Power: How Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution explores the reasons why Homo sapiens evolved so far away from other animals in several key attributes.