Michael Greenberg

Dr. Greenberg is the Nathan Marsh Pusey Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School. He received his Ph.D. in biochemistry from the Rockefeller University in 1982 and carried out his postdoctoral research at New York University Medical Center. After joining the faculty at Harvard Medical School in 1986, he served as the founding Director of the F. M. Kirby Neurobiology Center at Boston Children’s Hospital until 2008 then served as Chair of the Department of Neurobiology at HMS until 2022. 

As a postdoctoral fellow at NYU in 1984, Dr. Greenberg made the seminal discovery that growth factors induce the rapid and transient expression of a family of genes whose functions are critical for neuronal differentiation. Since then, his research has addressed the mechanisms and function of the activity-dependent gene program in neurons during development, plasticity, and in disease states. Dr. Greenberg’s discoveries of synaptic activity-dependent gene transcription, the key intracellular signaling pathways underlying stimulus-transcription coupling in neurons, and gene expression programs that mediate neuronal development and plasticity, have contributed greatly to our understanding of brain development and function and how diseases of cognition such as autism spectrum disorders arise when these processes go awry. 

In recognition of his contributions to neuroscience, Dr. Greenberg has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences and he has received numerous awards including the J. Allyn Taylor International Price in Medicine (with Dr. Roger Nicoll), the Julius Axelrod Award, the Perl-UNC Neuroscience Prize, a Jacob Javitz Neuroscience Investigator Award, the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience (with Dr. Carla Shatz), and the Brain Prize (with Dr. Christine Holt and Dr. Erin Schuman).