Michael Anthony Arbib (born May 28, 1940) is an American computational neuroscientist. He is an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at the University of California at San Diego and professor emeritus at the University of Southern California; before his 2016 retirement he was the Fletcher Jones Professor of computer science, as well as a professor of biological sciences, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, neuroscience and psychology. Early life and education Arbib was born in England on May 28, 1940, the oldest of four children. His parents moved to New Zealand when he was about 7, and on to Australia when he was about 9. Arbib was educated in New Zealand and at The Scots College in Sydney, Australia. In 1960 he took a BSc (Hons) at the University of Sydney, with the University Medal in Pure Mathematics. Arbib received his PhD in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963. He was advised by Norbert Wiener, the founder of cybernetics, and Henry McKean. As a student, he also worked with Warren McCulloch, the co-inventor of the artificial neural network and finite-state machine. Career Following his PhD, Arbib moved to Stanford for a postdoc with Rudolf E. Kálmán. Arbib spent five years at Stanford, before moving to become becoming the founding chairman of the Department of Computer and Information Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1970. He remained in the Department until 1986, when he joined the University of Southern California. He retired and was granted emeritus status in 2016. Arbib's collected papers from the period 1960 through 1985 are held by the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Awards and honors In 1992, Arbib was elected a Fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence for "his work in schema theory and neural networks to provide a linking methodology between distributed artificial intelligence and brain theory." In 2008, Arbib was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Selected bibliography Authored and co-authored books (1968) Algebraic Theory of Machines, Languages and Semigroups (1969) Theories of abstract automata Prentice-Hall (1973) with Louis Padulo System Theory. A Unified State-space Approach to Continuous and Discrete Systems Saunders (1975) with Ernest G. Manes Arrows, Structures, and Functors: The Categorical Imperative Academic Press (1978) with Suad Alagic The Design of Well-Structured and Correct Programs Springer (1981) with A.J. Kfoury and Robert N. Moll A Basis for Theoretical Computer Science Springer