Hollis Cline, PhD, is the Hahn Professor of Neuroscience in the departments of Molecular and Cellular Neuroscience, and Chemical Physiology at The Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, CA. She is a Councilor for the National Eye Institute, and has served on the Board of Scientific Councilors for the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS) and on the Blue Ribbon Review Panel for the 10-year review of the National Institute of Child Health and Development (NICHD). Dr. Cline is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has received the prestigious NIH Director’s Pioneer Award. Dr. Cline is currently President of the Society for Neuroscience. She received her BA from Bryn Mawr College and her PhD from the University of California at Berkeley, followed by postdoctoral training at Yale University and Stanford University. She has served on the faculty of the University of Iowa and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, where she served as the Director of Research from 2002-2006. Dr. Cline’s research has demonstrated the roles of a variety of activity-dependent mechanisms in controlling structural plasticity of neuronal dendrites and axons, synaptic maturation and topographic map formation. This body of work has helped to generate a comprehensive understanding of the role of experience in shaping brain development. Two key points to emerge from her research is that circuit formation in vivo is a dynamic process throughout development that is continuously guided by experience, and that the basic mechanisms governing brain development, plasticity, information processing and organizational principles of brain circuits are highly conserved across vertebrates.