Bill Harris

Bill Harris image 2
Subject
Neuroscience
College positions
Emeritus Fellow
University positions
Emeritus Professor of Anatomy
Email Address

Biography

The challenge that occupied me throughout my career is how the most complicated object in the known world, the brain, is built.   I started investigating neural development when I was a graduate student at Caltech (1972-1976) and I discovered genes that were involved in building the eye.  As a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School (1976-1980), I began investigating the role of activity patterns in the brain in the formations of synaptic connections.  I landed my first academic job at the University of California San Diego in 1980, where I worked on questions concerning how neurons send out long processes called axons that navigate through the embryonic brain to find their synaptic targets.  In 1997, I moved to Cambridge.  Here, I was particularly fascinated by questions of how the neurons in the brain choose their individual and cell-specific fates.

During my career, I have had the pleasure of collaborating with many wonderful scientists here and around the world.  After I retired from laboratory work, I wrote a popular science book about neural development called Zero to Birth: How the Human Brain is Built.  I still enjoy supervising students studying Neurobiology at Clare College.

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