Lawrence C. Katz

Who is Lawrence C. Katz?

Lawrence C. Katz was an American neurobiologist. He was an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. His lab was located in Duke University Medical Center, where he was the James B. Duke Professor of Neurobiology.

Katz received his B.S. from the University of Chicago and his Ph.D. in neurobiology from the California Institute of Technology, where he worked with Masakazu Konishi. He performed his postdoctoral work with Torsten Wiesel at the Rockefeller University and continued as an Assistant Professor at Rockefeller before moving to Duke.

His research focused on the development and function of the mammalian cortex, especially neurotrophins and neurogenesis. He pioneered the application of optical imaging of neurons and photostimulation to probe circuit development. His research centered on the key senses of hearing and language, sight and, most recently, smell, where he did groundbreaking research on the functional analysis of the olfactory system. Katz and his colleagues combined biochemistry and physiology to discover a mouse social pheromone—purifying a single, vanishingly rare molecule methanethiol from mouse urine based on its ability to stimulate olfactory neurons.