Michael Stryker is William Francis Ganong Professor in the Department of Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco, where he has been a faculty member since his appointment as Assistant Professor in 1978 and where he served as Department Chair from 1994-2005.  In 1987-1988 he was Visiting Professor in the Department of Human Anatomy at the University of Oxford in England.  From 1976-1978 he was Research Fellow in Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, where he worked with Nobel Laureates Torsten Wiesel and David Hubel.  He earned his B.A. in Philosophy with a minor in Mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and his Ph.D. degree in Psychology and Brain Sciences (Neurophysiololgy) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Stryker has received several awards and honors for his research, including appointment as the Galileo Galilei Professor of Science at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy (1993) and the highly selective MERIT (Method to Extend Research in Time) Award (1994-2005 from the National Eye Institute), which provides long-term financial support to outstanding researchers who have demonstrated superior research competence and productivity.  Other honors include the W. Alden Spencer Award from Columbia University and selection as a Fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Stryker has supported the greater neuroscience community through a number of professional service roles.  He has served on the editorial boards of many scientific publications, including Science, Neuron, Journal of Physiology, Journal of Neuroscience and the Series in Computational Neuroscience from Oxford University Press.  He has served on the National Science Foundation’s Developmental Neurosciences Advisory Panel, on the Scholars Review Committee for the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience, and as Chair, Section on Neuroscience for the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Stryker’s primary research interest is in the role of neural activity in the development and plasticity of precise connections within the central nervous system.  Most of his work focuses on the visual system, with particular emphasis on the developing visual cortex.

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