In this Coffee Chat, OIST students and researchers will have the opportunity to meet Prof. Michael Stryker (UCSF) and freely ask questions. Prof. Gerald Pao (Biological Nonlinear Dynamics Data Science Unit) is Michael's host at OIST and will act as facilitator of this session.

Profile: Michael Stryker earned his Ph.D. from MIT in Peter Schiller’s lab, followed by postdoctoral research with David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel at the Harvard Medical School. In 1978, he joined the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Department of Physiology and their nascent neuroscience program as an assistant professor, where he has since remained, except for sabbaticals at Oxford and Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa.
Stryker co-directed the UCSF graduate program, served as department chair for over 12 years, and directed the Herbert W. Boyer Program in Biological Science. He holds the W.F. Ganong Chair of Physiology at UCSF and has been honored with the W. Alden Spencer Prize from Columbia University and the 2023 Ralph W. Gerard Prize from the Society for Neuroscience. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
His research focuses on the role of neural activity in the development and plasticity of precise connections within the central nervous system. Most of his work has been on the visual system, particularly the visual cortex of the mouse in recent years. Current experimental work seeks to understand the cellular and neural circuit mechanisms of activity-dependent cortical plasticity, the interactions between neural activity and molecular cues in the formation of cortical maps, and the difference between the limited plasticity in the adult brain and the much greater plasticity during critical periods in early life. His research utilizes transgenic mice, along with optical and electrical approaches, for recording, labeling, and perturbing connections between specific cells.

Location: Lab 5 EF03 (Visiting Program area)

Language: English, no interpretation.

Target audience: Mainly students and early-career researchers