Dr. Malenka received an M.D. and Ph.D. in 1983 from Stanford University. He then completed residency training in psychiatry at Stanford and postdoctoral research at UCSF. In 1989, he was appointed Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Physiology at UCSF, at which he reached the rank of Full Professor in 1996. He returned to the Stanford University School of Medicine in 1999. He is an elected member of the United States’ National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including: the SfN Young Investigator Award (1993); the Kemali Foundation International Prize in Neuroscience (2000); the Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize (2006), and the SfN Julius Axelrod and Peter Seeburg prizes (2016, 2022). His papers have been cited >100,000 times and have provided foundational knowledge about the mechanisms of synaptic plasticity and modulation in the mammalian brain.