Michael F. Land

Who is Michael F. Land?

Michael Francis Land FRS is a British neurobiologist. He is currently Emeritus Professor of Neurobiology in the Sussex Vision laboratory at the Sussex Centre for Neuroscience, University of Sussex, England.

Land's research has been 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 in Sussex is now mainly concerned with the role of eye movement in human activities such as driving, music reading and ball games. In 2000 for example Land and a colleague reported their finding that in cricket, within 200 milliseconds after a ball leaves a 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.

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