Nick Strausfeld

Nicholas J. Strausfeld was born in Surrey and raised in Brighton, Sussex. He received his B. Sc. and Ph.D. from University College London (1965, 1968) and his German Habilitation from the University of Frankfurt. After 19 years in Germany, first at Frankfurt’s Zoology Institute, later the MPI Tübingen and EMBL Heidelberg, he was appointed full professor in 1987 in the Division of Neurobiology at the University of Arizona. His identification of neurons mediating motion detection and comparative studies of the insect brain led to a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in 1994, followed by a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius’ Fellowship in 1995. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of London in 2002. His current research focuses on brain evolution.