Michael F. Land

Michael Francis "Mike" Land FRS (12 April 1942 – 14 December 2020) was a British neurobiologist. He was a professor of neurobiology in the vision laboratory at the Sussex Centre for Neuroscience, University of Sussex, England.

Land's research was on different aspects of animal and human vision. His interests were in the optics of the eyes of marine animals, including scallops, shrimps and deep-water crustaceans. He also studied visual behaviour in spiders and insects, particularly during pursuit. This led to an interest in eye movement in animals and later in man.

Land's group was mainly concerned with the role of eye movement in human activities such as driving, music reading and ball games. In 2000, Land and a colleague reported their finding that within 200 milliseconds after a ball leaves a cricket bowler's hand, the best batsmen will take their eyes off the ball and look ahead to the point where they have calculated it will bounce (see also Land & McLeod (2000) in bibliography).

Other work was on the processing of visual information by the retinas of mosquitoes.

He died on 14 December 2020 at the age of 78.

Education The son of Frank William Land, from 1950 to 1960 he attended Birkenhead School, a direct grant school, on the Wirral in Cheshire. From there he went to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he studied zoology, graduating in 1963. A PhD in neurophysiology at University College London (UCL) followed, completed in 1968. It was at UCL that Land began his research into human and animal vision.

Academic career After completing his PhD at UCL, where he had been an assistant lecturer in Physiology, in 1969 Land became assistant professor of Physiology at University of California, Berkeley. He returned to the UK in 1971, taking up a post as a lecturer in neurobiology at the University of Sussex. Here he was appointed a reader in 1977. After being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1982 he was appointed as a professor in 1984. He was also a senior visiting fellow at the Australian National University, Canberra from 1982 to 1984. In 1994 he received the Frink Medal of the Zoological Society of London, and in 1996 the Alcon Prize for vision research. In 1998, he was elected a member of the Academia Europaea. Land retired from full-time academic work in 2005 and became an emeritus professor at Sussex.