Michael DeWeese received his BA (1988) in physics from the University of California at Santa Cruz, and his PhD (1995) in physics from Princeton University. From 1995 to 1999, he took a computational postdoctoral appointment at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, with a fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. He then pursued experimental neuroscience as a postdoctoral researcher at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island (NY) from 2000 to 2006. In 2007, he was appointed Assistant Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, with a joint appointment shared between the Physics Department and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute.