Mark F. Bear received his Ph.D. in neurobiology from Brown University. He took postdoctoral training from Wolf Singer at the Max Planck Institute for Brain Research in Frankfurt, Germany, and from Leon Cooper at Brown. He joined the faculty of the Brown University School of Medicine in 1985 and was named a Howard Hughes Medical Investigator in 1996. At Brown, he was awarded the 2000 Elizabeth H. Leduc Award for teaching excellence in the life sciences, and the Class of 2000 Barrett Hazeltine Citation for teaching excellence. In 2003, he was appointed Picower Professor of Neuroscience at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT.