Dr. Michael M. Merzenich is Professor Emeritus at UC San Francisco, where he ran a government-funded research lab, and is also Chairman and Chief
Scientific Officer of Posit Science Corporation, which develops and
distributes plasticity-based brain training programs and assessments.

He is widely known in the world of neuroscience for his breakthrough
research in brain plasticity and his translational research with respect
to applied plasticity. As a result of his seminal brain-mapping experiments thirty years ago,
Dr. Merzenich overturned the conventional wisdom that plasticity
ends in adolescence and showed that the adult brain remains plastic (or malleable) at any
age. He then applied principles of plasticity as a co-inventor of the cochlear implant, an
invention that has restored hearing to more than 300,000 people with deafness. His key
insight was that the artificial cochlear could work with just 8 connection points to the brain
(rather than the 3,000 of the natural cochlear) and that the brain’s plasticity would be able
to fill in the information to make the implant effective. In 2015, he was a co-recipient of the
Russ Prize from the National Academy of Engineering, the highest honor in Bio-Engineering,
for this invention.

In 1995, Dr. Merzenich took a sabbatical from UCSF to co-found Scientific Learning
Corporation (NASDAQ: SCIL), a company that has helped millions of school children with
language learning and reading, through exercises based on brain plasticity. Dr. Merzenich
was the company’s first CEO and served for many years as its Chief Scientific Officer.
In 2003, Dr. Merzenich co-founded Posit Science Corporation to distribute brain training
programs and assessments (shown effective in university laboratories around the world) to
improve performance. Today, more than 130 peer-reviewed articles show a wide range of
significant benefits from using these exercises and assessments, including gains in standard
measures of cognitive performance (eg, speed of processing, attention, memory, executive
function), in standard measures of quality of life (eg, health outcomes, health-related quality
of life, mood, depressive symptoms, feelings of control) and in standard measures of real
world performance (eg, functional independence, driving, balance, gait).

For his body of work, Dr. Merzenich is among a small number of scientists elected by his
peers to two of the three national academies in the United States. He is a member of both
the National Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Medicine. He is a recipient of many
honors and awards, including the Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions of the
American Psychological Association, the International Ipsen Prize, the Zulch Prize of the
Max-Plancke Institute, the Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award, the Purkinje Medal and the
Karl Spencer Lashley Award.

In June, Dr. Merzenich was designated a Kavli Laureate
(perhaps the highest award in neuroscience), and he will receive this honor from the King of
Norway in the venue of Nobel peace prize winners, in September.
Dr. Merzenich is an inventor on nearly 100 patents, and has received scores of government
grants. He is an author on hundreds of peer-reviewed journal articles and the author or
editor of several books, including one for lay readers entitled, Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change your Life.

He may be best known to lay audiences for his role in a series of documentaries on plasticity
on PBS and for his role in the award-winning Australian Broadcasting mini-series “Redesign
My Brain” (shown on the Science Channel in the US as “Hack My Brain”). He and his work
frequently are featured on television, in print media and on the web.