Mriganka Sur

Mriganka Sur (born 1953 in Fatehgarh, India) is an Indian-born neuroscientist working in the United States.

Mriganka Sur did his early schooling at the St. Joseph's College, Allahabad and he received the Bachelor of Technology degree in electrical engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur (IIT Kanpur) in 1974, and the Master of Science and PhD degrees in electrical engineering in 1975 and 1978, respectively, from Vanderbilt University in Nashville. After postdoctoral research at SUNY Stony Brook, he was appointed to the faculty of Yale University School of Medicine in 1983. He joined the faculty of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). in 1986. He was named in 1993 the Sherman Fairchild Professor of Neuroscience and in 1997 head of the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He is currently the Newton Professor of Neuroscience, head of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and director of the Simons Initiative on Autism and the Brain at MIT.

Sur is a pioneer in the study of brain plasticity and its mechanisms. Using experimental and theoretical approaches, his laboratory studies developmental plasticity and the dynamic changes in mature cortical networks during information processing, learning and memory. His laboratory has discovered fundamental principles by which neurons of the cerebral cortex are wired during development and change dynamically in adulthood. In landmark experiments, he “rewired” the brain to explore how the environment influences the development of cortical circuits. The retina, which normally projects to the visual cortex, was induced to project to structures that normally process hearing. Visual input altered the development of neuronal connections in the auditory cortex, thus enabling animals to use their "hearing" cortex to "see."

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