Michael Merzenich
| Michael M. Merzenich Merz, the Good Doctor, the Brain Guy |
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|---|---|
| Born | 1942 Lebanon, Oregon, United States |
| Education | University of Portland (SB), Johns Hopkins Medical School (PhD in Physiology), University of Wisconsin (postdoctoral studies) |
| Known for | Brain plasticity research |
| Medical career | |
| Profession | Professor emeritus neuroscientist |
| Institutions | University of California, San Francisco |
| Research | Basic and clinical sciences of hearing |
| Notable prizes | National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine, Kavli Prize, Russ Prize |
Michael M. Merzenich (born in 1942 in Lebanon, Oregon) is a professor emeritus neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. His contributions to the field are numerous. He took the sensory cortex maps developed by his predecessors like 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.
He led the cochlear implant team at UCSF, which transferred its technology to Advanced Bionics, and their version is the Clarion cochlear implant. He collaborated with Bill Jenkins and Gregg Recanzone to demonstrate sensory maps are labile into adulthood in animals performing operant sensory tasks. He collaborated with Paula Tallal, Bill Jenkins, and Steve Miller to form the company Scientific Learning. This was based on Fast ForWord software they co-invented that produces improvements in children's language skills that has been related to the magnitude of their temporal processing impairments prior to training.
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 brain-training application called BrainHQ (TM). Merzenich is Chief Scientific Officer and on the Board of Directors at Posit Science.
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.
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