Michale Fee

Michale Fee is the Glen V. and Phyllis F. Dorflinger Professor in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and an investigator at the McGovern Institute. He studies how the brain learns and generates complex sequential behaviors in song birds. Young birds learn to sing from their fathers, offering an ideal system to study the neural basis of learned behavior. Because the parts of the bird’s brain that control song learning are closely related to human circuits disrupted in brain disorders like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s disease, Fee hopes to discover new clues about the cause and possible treatment of these conditions. Before moving to MIT, he was a principal investigator in the Biological Computation Research Department at Bell Laboratories. He received the 2012 Larry Katz Prize for Innovative Research in Neuroscience and was a Dart Scholar. He is co-director of the Methods in Computational Neuroscience at Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass. He earned a PhD in applied physics from Stanford University.