Michael Merzenich

In 2015, the National Academy of Engineering awarded Dr. Merzenich the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize, the most prestigious award in bioengineering, for his work on cochlear implants. In 2016 he was awarded one of the world's top neuroscience prizes, the Kavli Prize, for his achievements in the field of brain plasticity.

He went on to be elected to the National Academy's Institute of Medicine in 2008, making him one of a very select few to have been elected to more than one of the National Academies.

Merzenich has collaborated in numerous studies researching brain plasticity. In February 2004, Merzenich gave a TED talk titled “Growing evidence of brain plasticity” which outlines the basic findings of his research. Merzenich has helped to identify two distinct periods of brain plasticity: The Critical Period and the period of Adult Plasticity. The Infant Critical Period is when a child’s brain establishes neural processes for the stimuli to which it is presented. The Adult Plasticity period is when the brain refines its neural processes as it masters a variety of tasks.

As of 2001, he received the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions. He has been awarded the International Ipsen Prize,

In May 1999, Merzenich was honored by election into the National Academy of Sciences for his research on brain plasticity.

Merzenich was director and Chief Scientific Officer of Scientific Learning between November 1996 and January 2003. Merzenich took two sabbaticals from UCSF, in 1997 and 2004. In 1997 he led research teams at Scientific Learning Corporation, and in 2004 at Posit Science Corporation. Currently, Merzenich's second company, Posit Science Corporation, is working on a broad range of behavioral therapies. Their lead product is a brain-training application called BrainHQ (TM). Merzenich is Chief Scientific Officer, and on the Board of Directors, at Posit Science.

Michael Matthias Merzenich (/ˈmɜːrzənɪk/ MURR-zə-nik; born 1942 in Lebanon, Oregon) is an American neuroscientist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Francisco. He took the sensory cortex maps developed by his predecessors (Archie Tunturi, Clinton Woolsey, Vernon Mountcastle, Wade Marshall, and Philip Bard) and refined them using dense micro-electrode mapping techniques. Using this, he definitively showed there to be multiple somatotopic maps of the body in the postcentral sulcus, and multiple tonotopic maps of the acoustic inputs in the superior temporal plane.

Born in Lebanon, Oregon in 1942, Merzenich grew up fascinated by science. He attended the University of Portland in Portland, Oregon earning his Bachelor of Science in 1964. Here, he was valedictorian, receiving only one non-A, a C in a philosophy course in which he argued with the instructor. In 1968 he earned his PhD in Physiology at Johns Hopkins Medical School in the lab of Vernon Mountcastle, studying neural coding of stimulus magnitude in the hairy skin. He left Johns Hopkins to conduct his postdoctoral studies at the University of Wisconsin under Jerzy Rose. There, he did a cross-species analysis of the cochlear nucleus in large game cats and pinnipeds, did the first auditory cortical microelectrode maps in the macaque with John Brugge, and the first somatosensory maps in the macaque with neurosurgeon Ron Paul. He earned his neurophysiology fellowship between 1968 and 1971. He left Wisconsin to join the faculty at UCSF as the only basic scientist in the clinical Otolaryngology department, head and neck surgery. Merzenich started with UCSF in 1971 as faculty member becoming full professor in 1980. Merzenich was Co-Director at the Coleman Memorial Laboratory where he conducted research on the cerebral cortex. He was also the Francis A. Sooy Chair of Otolaryngology, in the Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences at UCSF. His research examines neurological illness, learning processes and the neurological processes of the cerebral cortex. He remains in the same department, now as a professor emeritus, retiring in 2007.