Overton Brent Berlin

Professor Brent Berlin is the Graham Perdue Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Georgia. He also was Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies and co-director for the Laboratories of Ethnobiology. His publication, "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" led to a field of color terminology research and has been highly influential in anthropology, linguistics and cognitive sciences. Berlin and Kay concluded that the number of basic color terms in the world's languages are limited and center on certain focal colors, assumed to be cognitively hardwired. He led the Maya ICGB project, a bioprospecting consortium, supported by the Biodiversity Program for the National Institutes of Health, which was closed in 2001 after accusations of failure to obtain adequate informed consent from the Maya community from which he obtained indigenous knowledge. These allegations were primarily driven by a Canadian-based political activist organization, known at the time as RAFI.