Carla Shatz: Sapp Family Provostial Professor Director, Bio-X Program Professor of Biology & Neurobiology Stanford UniversityGREGORY COWLEY
Carla Shatz was the first woman awarded a PhD by the department of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. But she almost wasn’t accepted into the program. “The members of the admissions committee had quite a debate,” she says. “This was the Dark Ages—1971.” The only other female student in the department had dropped out after her first year. “They’d been burned once and were wondering whether they should give a chance to another woman.”
Burned they weren’t. As a student working with David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel, Shatz dove right into the problems that have occupied her entire scientific career: the development of the mammalian visual system, and how experience during critical developmental periods fine-tunes neural circuitry. “It was a magical time,” says Shatz. “I ...
