Carla Shatz

Carla J. Shatz is an American neuroscientist who showed that spontaneous, patterned neural activity before birth is essential for wiring the developing brain, notably in the visual system, and she coined the phrase 'cells that fire together wire together.' She was the first woman to earn a PhD in neurobiology from Harvard and later chaired departments at Stanford and Harvard. Mainstream biographies do not document her religious background in detail, though she is included in compilations of Jewish scientists.