Carla J. Shatz is the Sapp Family Provostial Professor of Biology and Neurobiology and the Catherine Holman Johnson Directorship of Bio-X at Stanford University’s pioneering interdisciplinary biosciences program. She received her bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Radcliffe College in 1969, a master of philosophy (Physiology, 1971) from University College London where she was a Marshall Scholar, and a doctorate (Neurobiology, 1976) from Harvard Medical School.

In 1978, Shatz joined the faculty at Stanford University then moved to the University of California, Berkley in 1992. In 2000, she joined Harvard Medical School as the first woman chair of the Department of Neurobiology. She returned to Stanford in 2007 to direct Bio-X.

Shatz is a neuroscientist who has devoted her career to understanding the dynamic interplay between genes and environment that shapes brain circuits — the very essence of our being. She has earned many honors and awards, including being elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and the Royal Society of London. Shatz received the Gruber Neuroscience Prize in 2015. In 2016, she was the recipient of the Champalimaud Vision Prize and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for the discovery of mechanisms that allow experience and neural activity to remodel brain circuits. In 2018, she received the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.