Michael M. Merzenich (born in 1942 in Lebanon, Oregon) is a professor emeritus neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco. His contributions to the field are numerous. He took the sensory cortex maps developed by his predecessors like Archie Tunturi, Clinton Woolsey, Vernon Mountcastle, Wade Marshall, and Philip Bard, and refined them using dense micro-electrode mapping techniques. 

Using this, he definitively showed there to be multiple somatotopic maps of the body in the postcentral sulcus,and multiple tonotopic maps of the acoustic inputs in the superior temporal plane.He received Russ Prize in 2015 for engineering cochlear implants that enable the deaf to hear.