Carla J. Shatz is Sapp Family Provostial Professor of Biology and Neurobiology and the Catherine Holman Johnson Director of Bio-X, Stanford University’s pioneering interdisciplinary biosciences program. She received her B.A. in Chemistry from Radcliffe College in 1969, an M.Phil. (Physiology; 1971) from University College London as a Marshall Scholar, and a Ph.D. (Neurobiology; 1976) from Harvard Medical School. Shatz joined the faculty at Stanford in 1978, then moved to University of California at Berkeley in 1992, and to Harvard Medical School in 2000 as the first woman Chair of the Department of Neurobiology. She returned to Stanford in 2007 to direct Bio-X. Dr. Shatz is a neuroscientist who has devoted her career to understanding the dynamic interplay between genes and environment that shapes brain circuits - the very essence of our being. Shatz has earned many honors and awards, including election to the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society and the Royal Society of London. She received the Gruber Neuroscience Prize in 2015. In 2016, she was the recipient of the Champalimaud Vision Prize, and also the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience for the discovery of mechanisms that allow experience and neural activity to remodel brain circuits. In 2018, she received the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.