Michael A. Arbib has been Emeritus as University Professor, Fletcher Jones Professor of computer science, and professor of biological sciences, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, neuroscience and psychology at the University of Southern California since 2016. He currently is an adjunct professor of psychology at the University of California at San Diego where he also explores the possible roles of neuroscience in the architecture of the built environment.

Born in England in 1940, Arbib was educated in New Zealand and Australia, earning his Bachelor of Science degree in 1960 at the University of Sydney. He received his PhD in Mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1963, and then spent five years as an assistant professor at Stanford before joining the University of Massachusetts Amherst where he became the founding chairman of the Department of Computer and Information Science in 1970.

Arbib joined the staff of the University of Southern California in 1986, continuing the research best expressed in the title of his first book, Brains, Machines, and Mathematics (McGraw-Hill, 1964)in which he asserted that though the brain is not a computer in the current technological sense, we can learn much about machines from studying brains and much about brains from studying machines.

Arbib has always promoted an interdisciplinary environment in which computer scientists and engineers can talk to neuroscientists and cognitive scientists, and this interplay has led him to work in computer science, linguistics, computational neuroscience, and neuroinformatics. He was also highly involved in providing the first computational model of mirror neurons and conducting some of the key initial imaging studies of the human mirror system.

At USC, Arbib was founder and the first Director of the Center for Neural Engineering, with his research focusing on the coordination of perception and action. Arbib initiated the USC Brain Project, which is engaged in developing new tools and methodologies for neuroinformatics and exploring the evolution of the human language-ready brain.