Carla J Shatz

Career

Shatz graduated from Radcliffe College in 1969 with a B.A. in chemistry. She received an M.Phil. in Physiology from the University College London in 1971 on a Marshall Scholarship. In 1976, she received a Ph.D. in neurobiology from Harvard Medical School, where she studied with the Nobel laureates David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel. From 1976 to 1978 she obtained postdoctoral training with Dr. Pasko Rakic in the department of neuroscience, Harvard Medical School.

In 1978, Shatz moved to Stanford University, where she began her studies of the development of the mammalian visual system in the department of Neurobiology. She became professor of neurobiology in 1989. In 1992, she moved her laboratory to the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley, where she became a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.

During 1994-1995, she was president of the Society for Neuroscience and served on the Council of the National Academy of Sciences from 1998 to 2001. From 2000 until 2007, she was the chair of the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and the Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology. She loved Stanford but says, "I couldn't turn it down because I felt I was on a mission to represent women at the highest levels."

She also helped to develop the Harvard Center for Neurodegeneration and Repair (now named the NeuroDiscovery Center) and led the Harvard Center for Brain Imaging. Shatz is the inaugural chair holder of The Sapp Family Provostial Professorship, holds professorship appointments in both the Department of Biology (School of Humanities and Sciences) and in Neurobiology (School of Medicine) and is David Starr Jordan Director of the Bio-X program at Stanford University School of Medicine.

Research

Shatz is one of the pioneers who determined some of the basic principles of early brain development. She found that the spontaneous activity of neurons in utero is critical for the formation of precise and orderly neural connections in the central nervous system. Her recent work shows that waves of spontaneous activity in the retina can alter gene expression and the strength of synaptic connections.

Shatz is credited with coining the sentence summarizing the Hebbian theory: "Cells that fire together, wire together." Although a similar phrase might first have appeared in print in Siegrid Löwel's Science article in Januar, 1992, Shatz had been using it in lectures for a number of years before. In her September 1992 Scientific American article, she wrote, "Segregation to form the columns in the visual cortex [...] proceeds when the two nerves are stimulated asynchronously. In a sense, then, cells that fire together wire together. The timing of action-potential activity is critical in determining which synaptic connections are strengthened and retained and which are weakened and eliminated."

Awards

Shatz's honors include the Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award, the Gill Prize presented by the Indiana University Gill Center for Biomolecular Sciences, the Silvo Conte Award from the National Foundation for Brain Research, the Charles A. Dana Award for Pioneering Achievement in Health and Education, the Alcon Award for Outstanding Contributions to Vision Research, the Bernard Sachs Award from the Child Neurology Society, the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, and the Weizmann Women & Science Award. She has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Philosophical Society. In 1997, she was invited by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton to speak at the White House Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning. In 2011, she was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. In 2015, she was awarded the Gruber prize in Neuroscience and in 2016 the Champalimaud Foundation Vision Award.

Major publications