Michael M. Merzenich, PhD

Chief Scientific Officer
Dr. Merzenich leads the company's scientific team. For more than three decades, Dr. Merzenich has been a leading pioneer in brain plasticity. He is the Francis A. Sooy Professor at the Keck Center for Integrative Neurosciences at UCSF. Dr. Merzenich is a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Ipsen Prize, Zülch Prize of the Max-Planck Institute, Thomas Alva Edison Patent Award and Purkinje Medal. Dr. Merzenich has published more than 200 articles, including many in leading peer-reviewed journals, such as Science and Nature. His work is also often covered in the popular press, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Time and Newsweek. He has appeared on Sixty Minutes II, CBS Evening News and Good Morning America. In the late 1980s, Dr. Merzenich was on the team that invented the cochlear implant, now distributed by market leader Advanced Bionics. In 1996, Dr. Merzenich was the founding CEO of Scientific Learning Corporation (Nasdaq: SCIL), which markets and distributes software that applies principles of brain plasticity to assist children with language learning and reading. He is an inventor on more than 50 patents. Dr. Merzenich earned his BS degree at the University of Portland and his PhD at Johns Hopkins.
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“The majority improved 10 or more years in neurocognitive status, so 80-year-olds had the memories of 70-year olds,” says Prof. Merzenich. “With more training, I expect we could get it to 25 years.”
—The Wall Street Journal

"You can change your brain at any age in powerful ways as a function of how you use it."
— Dr. Michael Merzenich