Michael Stryker

He has been married to Barbara Poetter since 1978.  They have 4 children born between 1980 and 1995.  They live in Marin County north of San Francisco.

In graduate school he studied neurophysiology at the new Department of Psychology and Brain Science (now Brain and Cognitive Sciences) at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, first working with Peter Schiller on the coding of eye movement and vision in the mammalian superior colliculus.  He and Schiller created the first computer-driven optical display capable of randomly interleaving sharply focused bar and edge stimuli and recording the responses of neurons in the visual system to measure their tuning properties .  With fellow student Helen Sherk, he used this apparatus to demonstrate innately selective responses in the visual cortex, confirming earlier qualitative studies of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, and to reveal that the effect of restricted rearing was to preserve innately selective responses rather than to instruct the development of neurons to reflect visual experience.  He received his Ph.D. in 1975.

Michael Paul Stryker (born June 16, 1947) is an American neuroscientist specializing in studies of how spontaneous neural activity organizes connections in the developing mammalian brain , and for research on the organization, development, and plasticity of the visual system in the ferret and the mouse.

Stryker was born in Savannah, GA, in 1947 to George B. Stryker, Jr., a civil engineer, and Estelle R Stryker (née Nulman), a nurse.  He studied liberal arts at Deep Springs College and then the University of Michigan, where he graduated in philosophy and mathematics.  After college, he joined the Peace Corps to work on water development in Kenya .